The Gong Show

As daylight leaks out of the sky at 4:30pm, and temperatures approach freezing, I need this picture more than ever:

Munjal (Riya CEO) has revived his old series of posts regarding the early days of Riya. The new additions to the series reflect the transition from being a photo sharing site to becoming a visual search engine. It is must read material for anyone interested in entrepreneurship.

A choice quote describing a speech by Munjal to the company:

People looked shell shocked that the three of us were genuinely scared we would fail. This was a side we had never shown before. We said that we were going to pursue this and we needed their support to pull this off. If anyone was not on this “bus”, they should get off now rather than slow us down.

I miss mechanical feedback on the recent slew of “cutting-edge” consumer electronics (CE) devices I have used. CE designers recently have been using flat buttons with pressure actuators (non-mechanical) instead of mechanical feedback buttons because they are sleeker or sexier, but, for me, they’re just less usable.

For example, I want a volume dial on my ipod that physically moves, so I can gauge how much I am adjusting the volume using my hand instead of my ears. On my iPod 4G I have to guess-and-check my way to an appropriate volume when I am adjusting the level while not looking at the screen, like when my iPod is in my bag. If I had mechanical feedback, I could adjust the volume more accurately.

This is a subject I care about because I once worked for a gaming mouse manufacturer. I liked the concept, but hated the device because half the buttons didn’t provide adequate mechanical feedback.

This subject is on my mind because I just read an interesting article on mechanical feedback vs non-mechanical feedback devices.

(Image by splorp on Flickr)

When Read/Write Web reported on the recent death of Pluck, Richard MacManus stated quite bluntly in the title: “RSS Readers a Dead Market Now.” Richard MacManus elaborated on this point in the body:

I’m afraid to say that consumer RSS Readers are rapidly becoming commodities and will soon be next to worthless – the real business is white label and enterprise solutions.

I completely agree that RSS aggregators are becoming commodities (or as I prefer to describe them: features). But, I disagree that the market it dead. I think it means that increased competition without innovation has created a logjam. Some aggregators will die off, some will stay in capital-efficient cruise control, and others will evolve. I could see a new entry into the field with interesting innovations disrupt market leaders. The market is not dead.

For example, as Outlook and IE7 integrate RSS in the coming months, a new wave of not-so-tech-saavy users will re-experience RSS in a whole new way. I don’t know if the user experience will be substantially better or worse, but it will require RSS aggregators to change an adapt to people’s new expectations when they click on a little orange RSS feed link. This disruption in user experience will generate new opportunities (and close off old opportunities) in the RSS aggregation market. It will be interesting to say the least.

I don’t think there has been much innovation in the field since Bloglines sold to Ask. Rojo hinted at the notion of WeMedia meets RSS Aggretation, but it was a half-baked. I would love to see a richer approach to social media meets RSS aggregation.

I suspect an aggregator that could solve the following problems could create significant traction:

• Existing aggregators require explicit updates and maintenance. I would like to see an aggregator that silos feeds I don’t read and recommends feeds I should be reading with as little work on my behalf as possible.
• Existing aggretaors have no concept of interestingness. This must be a solvable problem given that Flickr figured it out for photos using metrics like comments, pageviews, inbound links, and number of people who listed a given picture as a favorite. All those same metrics are available for blog posts, so and aggregator should leverage that and develop interestingness for blog posts.
• Existing aggregators organize by blog and by post. Why no organize by meme? Some kind of techmeme/aggregator mashup would be interesting because that’s typically how I use my aggregator: to search for memes, which span across multiple blogs I like. Make finding blog-crossing memes easier.

The RSS aggregator market is not dead until the existing players (or new entries) start experimenting with new ideas like these and still fail.

This blog is best blog I’ve seen in awhile The Painting Journalist by Ashley Cecil. It’s like Hugh, but better!
A snippet from Ashley’s about page:

Welcome to the marriage of painting and social activism. I’ve been creating art ever since discovering that my mom’s Chanel lipstick made a great oil pastel. Through formal art education and years of professional experience, the adult version of this vocation has evolved into my own job title, “painting journalist.” I’m addressing philanthropic issues utilizing painting as my medium of communication. Much like a photojournalist, I travel to locations/events of cultural interest and capture them, only with my brush.

I can’t describe it any better than that.

The image on in this post is a painting for sale on Ashley’s site, which I particularly like. I once tried to paint a bronze nude statue. It was a total mess trying to handle all the light both bouncing off the statue and absorbed by the statue… Ugh, I’m frustrated just thinking about it. My past experience made me appreciate the choices she made in this painting. My online archive of work pales in comparison, but this is a good opportunity to link to it nonetheless.

Oh, and the icing on the cake is I found this blog via my MyBlogLog widget on my site. Apparently, Ashley has visited The Gong Show recently. MyBlogLog Rocks.

During all my recent Firefox drama, I installed lots of new extensions. I installed half of the recommended extensions (about 10 in total) and a select few others. One of the extensions I installed was Ad Block Plus, which makes some interesting choices in regards to ad-blocking.

But first, my background in the subject. I first start blocking ads in college with my HOSTS file. A HOSTS file is basically like a pre-processor for IP addresses. When you ask a computer for a link, like www.google.com, the computer checks the HOSTS file on the local harddrive first to see if www.google.com maps to anything special there. If it does, then it uses that special value, and if it doesn’t, then it sends the request out to the network. (This description is over-simplified, but it’s good enough to get a novice up to speed).

So, in college, I would grab an ad-blocking HOSTS file from the net that would map servers like “ad.doubleclick.net” to dead IP addresses like 127.0.0.1. That way, anytime a website told my computer to go grab an ad from doubleclick and display it to me, my computer would grab nothing instead. I had to update my ad-blocking HOSTS file once a month because ad servers would change frequently (it was a cat-and-mouse game).

I eventually gave up blocking ads through my HOSTS file because it caused many pages to render poorly. There would be large gaps in pages, or other pages that required viewing an ad because seeing content (like iFilm) simply stopped working once I blocked the ad with my HOSTS file. I didn’t think avoiding advertising was worth the hassle of a broken browsing experience anymore.

Since my college days, the line between advertising and content has blurred significantly. A few examples:

• Harvey Danger released their last album entirely for free in unrestricted MP3s on the internet. It was advertising to get people to buy the CD (or donate on the website). Plus, it generated a ton of publicity. Download it if this sounds interesting to you.
• CareerBuilder’s Monk-e-mail (created by Oddcast) was a reliable source of bite-sized entertainment in the work environment. The content was an ad (or perhaps some people saw it as the ad was the content, if that difference makes sense).
• This beautiful Sony Bravia ad directed by Jonathan Glazer falls more under “content” than “advertising.” It’s art, that Sony was smart enough to fund.

Are these examples ads? Content? Both?

Circling back the the software that started this post, Ad Block Plus, here’s the point: Ad Block Plus doesn’t block AdWords, but it does block AdSense. It doesn’t block my MyBlogLog tracking script, but it does block my Urchin tracking script. It blocks my Indeed job listings… my Indeed jobs seem as much like content as anything else on my back because they’re persistent vertical search snippets. That’s the equivalent of blocking my del.icio.us bookmarks roll (if I had one) IMHO.

These decisions to block some “ads” but not others seem so arbitrary to me. What is content? What is advertising?

If a user wants to see something, does that make it content? When I’m shopping for a car, I want to see all the best car deals I can possibly find, so that would make any ads with car prices content in that context. What if that next day I’m researching stereos… now the car ads are just obtrusive ads, and the stereo ads are now content. So, whether or not a user wants to see something is too shifty to define content vs advertising.

If a publisher is paid to place certain text and images on a site in a certain location, does that make those text and images ads? This definition is also tenuous at best because every job listed on Craigslist in the New York area cost $25, but jobs listing are content to Craigslist users looking for jobs. Or try this counter-example if you prefer, the make-your-own Chevy Tahoe viral ad campaign paid “The Apprentice” to promote what ended up being rather funny critical commentary of Chevy. It was an indirect paid placement of critical content, not advertising.

This wandering argument is unfortunately drifting toward the trite conclusion that ads are in the eye of the beholder. But one more closing remark to try to keep things interesting: I’m still waiting for someone to develop a tool that allows me to ignore advertisers that I find obtrusive while also giving me access to ads that I find interesting (deem to be content), but without requiring my explicit permission or banning. The system needs to determine the difference implicitly based on my browsing behavior in order to be useful for me.

With heavy disappointment and lots of reservations, I have rolled back to Firefox 1.5.0.7, the last stable release prior to Firefox 2. I still stand by my original review about the new FF 2 feature set, but I have to add the following update.

FF 2 crashed on me about once every two hours on average. It usually happened while I was scrolling, but not always, so I’m not sure if the bug is associated with scrolling or not. It obliterated a number of half-filled forms and almost-finished blog posts.

I really miss both the “inline spellcheck” and “recently closed tabs” features. Bummer. Anyone know of a spell check extension for FF 1.5? I learned about an undo closed tab extension, which is helpful.

Anyone experiencing consistent crashing in FF 2? Got any solutions? A little bird told me it was because I also installed the IE 7 beta, but I uninstalled both FF 2 and IE 7 to start fresh, and then reinstalled FF 2, and it still consistently crashed, so I don’t think the problem is related to IE 7.

(“Computer Bug” by Hil on Flickr)

Update: Google Toolbar has a pretty good spellchecker, so I’m done with Firefox 2 until they release an update.

I rolled my own search yesterday with the “Create Your Own Search Engine” feature at Google Coop. I dumped my OPML (and a few other select sites I follow that don’t have feeds) into Google Coop and now I have a search engine custom tailored to return results from the sites I follow regularly. It searches about 100 different sites. Try it out on the right sidebar of my site, or just go straight to my search engine homepage.

One complaint: I don’t like the way Pagerank works in the context of my own personal search. Pagerank works well for the entire web, but I wish I could set my own priorities for rankings of results in my own personal search. Valuable, relatively-unknown sites like Game Girl Advance should be ranked ahead of massive interesting, but not targeted, web services like Digg. Unfortunately, a site like Digg has a higher PageRank than Game Girl Advance, so it’s given priority in the rankings.

Aside from that one complaint, I’m a big fan! Again, check out my search engine.

I am attending a fundraising event for the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) tonight. It’s being held at the Rubin Museum, which is an interesting choice of venue. I’m looking forward to a brief museum tour. The honorees include:

• Joseph and Shirley Wershba – Veteran journalists at CBS News
• Rick Piltz – Founder and Director of Climate Science Watch

I believe strongly in their pro-Free Speech agenda, and I appreciate their thought leadership and activism in the field.

I think of Free Speech is a cause that aligns well with my liberal political stance, and as such, I find it incredibly disheartening that the Democrats have picked censoring video game violence as their “pro-family” issue to champion this election season. It’s a frustrating example of “sound bite” legislation that undermines the intelligence and responsibility of American families, discourages digital artistic expression, and limits access to information and entertainment.

My mother, Susan Clare, is a member of the NCAC Board of Directors, and Joan Bertin, the Executive Director of NCAC, is a family friend, so I have personal (in additional to philosophical) ties to the organization.