Category: Thoughts

The Boston Globe is not the world’s best paper. For example, today it noticed that it’s hard to tell when someone’s on a cell phone or crazy. It’s only been a standup joke since the last century. Hey guys, it wasn’t very funny then and it’s still not funny now that it’s BlueTooth headsets instead of plug-in headsets.

Earlier, they discussed the 1% rule— which is that about one percent of your online consumers will create some content (actually it’s less: 0.065% in the case of YouTube). It’s pretty much obvious that way more people consume than create, and also misleading. A 0.065% contributor-to-consumer ratio is much higher than with old media where there are perhaps a dozen creators and five billion consumers. The fact that as many as one percent of your users might say something to you is incredible. One percent is a great achievement, not a lamentable failure.

And the fact that the one percent might be anyone, that there are few barriers to a voice coming from the wilderness and creating the best YouTube video or blog post ever, catapulting itself to global stardom? That’s the best part. That can’t really happen in film or news or television.

Old-school internet curmudgeon JWZ has often been quoted as saying that all technologies boil down to helping the user get laid. Email, file-sharing, web-browsing, databases, whatever: it has to ultimately lead to getting some ass, because that’s the primary human drive.

The most direct software for that is, of course, dating sites. TechCrunch profiles 13 new ones. Do we need that many? Yes and no. Probably not all of them will survive. But on the other hand, if every website is the online equivalent of brightly colored plumage, then the world wants a hell of a lot more than 13 dating sites.

JWZ’s theory is flawed, of course: there are other human drives and not every technology is aimed at satisfying the reproductive urge. Stem cell research, for example, will probably never get anyone laid. And internet video of Josh Bolten’s defense of the stem cell veto has destroyed nearly all possibility that he will find sex, love, or work ever again.

According to Cranky Geeks, Digg got a huge surge in traffic because it managed to be the top Google News search result about Paris Hilton’s cell-phone troubles some time in February. But that’s not the right time-frame for the spikes in traffic that I see from the Alexa rankings: Nov-Dec ’05 and April ’06.

Any theories?

Monday I went to the Sox/Royals game with Bookdwarf, where it was incredibly hot.

Tuesday, I knew it was going to be hot so I went to the office where there was A/C. Someone emailed me a link and I clicked on it without thinking. It was a video of people having sex in time to music. I yelped and closed the window as fast as I could. Everyone turned around to see what I was trying to hide. Hilarity.

Today I’ve been updating the StyleFeeder FAQ, sending out new welcome messages, and trying to figure out how Flash 9 and MySpace interact.

Have a look at this chart of Alexa rankings of Digg and Del.icio.us. Both of them– and a lot of other collaborative-media sites like Technorati, Reddit, and MetaFilter— have small spikes in late 2005 and a giant spike right in the middle of April 2006. What happened? What were they doing, what was the world doing, that made those sites so popular so quickly?

Looking at one site you’d think that there were a couple of points where a critical mass built up, or maybe they scooped a couple good stories, or got some very positive coverage in a few major venues. Or perhaps they released a new version of their software and got a lot easier to use and therefore more popular.

But seeing all those sites with the same traffic patterns makes me think that it was something about the zeitgeist that made all those buzzwords like “collaborative news” and “citizen media” relevant to a lot more citizens.

Obviously, I want that kind of relevance, that kind of traffic and success, for StyleFeeder.

To get that, I have to find out not only what made it happen then, but what can make it happen now. Neither answer is clear.

SpaceCadetz links to the Worst of MySpace, but they haven’t really updated in awhile. So I’ve put together a few horrors I’ve come across in my promotional efforts on the StyleFeeder group:

• Group Name: Winnipeg Hotboxers
  Description: For all the cool kids in Winnipeg
  Members: 1

• Katie’s Layouts will crash most browsers.
• Someone asking for HTML help with a message made of sparkly graphics.
• Fashionistaz Galore has really annoying mouseover effects for all its links.
• Miles is the narrator of a chick-lit novel. He is a dog. He lists his income at 250k+, and wants to meet horny dogs. He liks crotches. The author’s homepage also features a clueless introduction and a bio consisting of an interview between the narrator and the author. The dog narrator and the author. Did I mention that the book is semi-autobiographical?

Someone’s abuelita cheers on the Argentinian national side.

My neighbors just painted their house orange. Also I just found out that he went to Haverford and she went to Bryn Mawr, and that they graduated in ’95. That makes four people from the Bi-Co on one small block: them, me, and Heather across the street, whose Spanish class I TA’ed (and whose roommate I dated). Weird.

My mother’s father used to read the San Diego local paper, at the time a highly local and highly right-wing rag. He insisted that the New York Times was too influential. My father, ignorant of naval rules, disagreed freely and told him that the Times was influential because it was better, and that he should read it.

Things I have learned in the Times today: There’s an incredible World-Cup billboard in Frankfurt. Frankfurt is a pretty boring town, but it’s going all-out this year. (See also Top 10 Sources for World Cup Soccer). All that new Voice over IP stuff is insecure. It’s vulnerable to brilliant exploits like traditional telephony was in the 70s and 80s. Ohio is replacing Florida as the land of fucked-up electoral politics.

Take that, San Diego Union-Tribune.

The Guardian has a great piece on the Duke lacrosse scandal and what it means for college sports. Apparently it’s been circulating at UVA and other sports-heavy colleges around the country. The upshot: hot teams bring recognition and tuition-paying undergrads. They also bring down academic standards and increase corruption, violence, binge drinking.

Great stats: “One survey showed 50 students die each year from alcohol poisoning. American students spend $6bn a year on alcohol, more than on books, snack food and all other drinks combined.” “The fact is that male student athletes, who make up only 3 per cent of the student population, account for 19 per cent of campus sexual assaults. Professor Richard Lapchick of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics of Sport at the University of Central Florida believes that one in seven female students is sexually assaulted at college. Yet few incidents are reported and even fewer lead to prosecution.”

(If the crimes go unreported, how do the reporters know the real numbers? My guess is that the data comes from surveys, or possibly from a disparity between medical-center reports and criminal charges filed…)

Of course, to me, the Duke scandal just confirmed everything I have thought about lacrosse players since junior high school.