ThisWillNeverMakeMoney.com

Information is an input to wisdom. We’ve commoditized knowledge, and the value is moving down the chain to wisdom. Indexing was step 1, and its basically over. Now comes the understanding part, and tools are beginning to be built for that too.

I don’t view this as a loss of capability any more than the fact that I can’t hunt animals for food. Sourcing facts is now a function of technology. Soon, understanding those facts will be as well. I guess after that, we’ll start getting tools that generate new content from that understanding?

The Singularity should be fun…

relevant articles:
I Google, Therefore I Know? -Baer
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2010/01/if_theres_something_that_fasci.html

Is Google Making Us Stupid? -Carr
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

I tend to get a lot of questions about what I do, and as it turns out, Product Management isn’t the easiest job to explain. I hit on a metaphor the other day that I like, though: all three of the jobs in the title make up the Who, What, Where, When, What, Why, How of software and web development.

Who, When, Where (sometimes) - Project Management - These people figure out the scheduling and the planning, once the project has been defined in terms of content and technology.

How - Software Engineering - The ones who take the project, and figure out the systems that will make it actually do what its supposed to.

What, Why - Product Management - This is my gig, and I’m a big fan. I don’t really care how, when, who, or where you do it, but I know what we want, and why we want it. I’m overstating my case here a bit, I do find the other parts interesting, but the bread and butter is the ideas for me. The other two can work at almost any firm and find challenges and interesting problems, but a product manager needs a company with an exciting business.

Its nice to have a job where you can evaluate the opportunity based on the company website and public knowledge, and can usually explain what’s interesting about your projects to laymen. Project Management and Software Engineering, not so much.

Google has their Project 10 ^ 1000, which is intended to source projects that can help the most people. Great idea, absolutely love it. But some people just don’t have big google brains, and came up with ideas that help, well, 10^3.6989 people. I did the math.

“Create more efficient landmine removal programs”. Cool, we all loved Princess Di, and whatever celeb is pitching this cause today. Landmines suck.
But from the description: “There are an estimated 110 million landmines still active in 70 countries; they have been blamed for over 5,000 casualties annually”. 5000? That’s 10^4ish. Weak sauce.

The rest of the ideas are ok, but mostly already underway somewhere. The one I liked the most, and which got my vote, is “Build better banking tools for everyone”. Banking documents and processes are opaque, unfriendly behemoths, and this leaves most people at a disadvantage. I would love to see Google take on the financial world and repackage it in the way that only they can.

I’ve seen quite a few posts lately that suggest that the future of publishing and creative pursuits is to skip the publisher apparatus, and bring the payment from eventual consumers much earlier in the process.

I’m still hunting for the journalism article on my other computer (for the doubters, this is why I never close tabs), but the basic idea was that the journo would pitch their idea on some public forum, and the eventual viewing public would commit $x, small amounts each, to the actual execution.

Valve (creator of the wildly successful Counterstrike and Half-Life games) has an article today on Tom’s Hardware (http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Valve-Games-halflife-steam,news-4277.html) about how they would like a similar model applied to the gaming industry, and suggests that gamers would be willing to contribute funding to the creation of a game, in exchange for a cut of proceeds and a copy of the game.

I’m almost finished reading free, and I think that these articles are touching on the same pain points - the marketplace is shifting, and we need a much different mechanism for creating value.

There will be a more coherent followup to this post later today. I’m also thinking there is a google-sized opportunity to build this marketplace. Think Kiva/donorschoose.org, but with 1st world sized budget requests, and without all that mushy gushy charity angle.

I’m starting to think nobody on the internet browses like I do. 3 separate job sites broke for me when trying to do tab based browsing.

1. TheLadders.com - Ctrl-clicking a job post doesnt open a new tab due to js weirdness, and totally breaks my usage pattern of opening everything I’m interested, and then doing deeper reviews after the first pass.

2. Taleo (backing Amazon’s listings) - Taleo will open a new tab, but all it will say is “please don’t use tabs, we’re retarded, and stuck in 1999.” Ridiculous.

3. EA.com - opening the job listing in a new tab resized my entire browser. Fail.

What they should do
Treat the job posting as a regular page, like everything else.
It should be directly addressable, not hidden behind JS/Flash/Session/Whatever.
It should stay the same size, and not mess with the rest of my browser.
It should never, ever play music. (unrelated beef with the internet at large)

/rant

The ugliness of my current theme was getting to me. I’ll change it to something more reasonable soon.

Twitter search has opened the site to spam for the first time, and I’m calling this kind of spam “swine flu”, mainly to prove the point that this will be more read if I spam popular keywords. Read on for more.

First off, background reading for the biggest reason why twitter is interesting. 30 sec version - twitter is the first truly opt in communication tool. You must follow to get content. Pull, not push.

You’re thinking, hmm, never thought of it that way. Wow, that is different. I knew there was some reason I loved twitter besides Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk).

Btw, for the uninitiated, twitter’s business plan is roughly -

1. 1. 140 character updates about the sandwich you just ate.
2. 2. ????
3. 3. Profit.

(does that ever get old? no.)

Turns out that 2. is actually Twitter Search (launched last week) plus TweetSense, making them into either the 140 character google, or, if you’re into hype, the real-time google. Wow, even cooler. This crazy internet company is gonna be rich!

To recap: Twitter is opt in, pull, and trusted people only. Twitter Search is opt in, pull, and the whole wide world. Oops. Hello porn industry. Hello scams. Hello keyword squatters. And the only line of defense seems to be manual control by twitter’s people of “suspicious accounts”.

More to come in the morning, but this screams opportunity. I’m still trying to determine an angle that doesnt involve spamming.

Also heres a metric for twitter search terms, just discovered tonight while trying to decide on posting this as “Swine Flu” or “#swineflu” - tweets/hour - the number of new tweets found by searching for the term in an hour. Since twitter doesn’t give counts of results, a better metric is the speed of results. Aggregate those speeds, and voila - twitter trends.

Ran into a problem with AIM today, all of my third party options for connecting to AIM are failing. If this is on purpose, its really not cool. They are all giving an error trying to connect.

See this thread -

http://messageboards.aol.com/aol/en_us/articles.php?boardId=565563&forward=false&listPos=_articleId:16:2034096511459833_threadId:16:1750422511493674_pageNum:1:1&
articleId=37095&func=6&filterRead=false&filterHidden=true&filterUnhidden=false&numPageTokens=9

Saw this note from an old friend on facebook, had to share it:

Facebook is to Me What a Hemorrhoid is to an Already Mean Old Man

I hate facebook. It is going to give me a fucking seizure. I log on and am bombarded by all kinds of ridiculous requests. I’m supposed to take a quiz to find out which type of chair I’m most like! I’ve been nominated as someone’s cutest friend! I have to nominate 46569676 of my own goddamn friends! I’ve been bitchslapped on facebook! I’ve been poked! Jesus. I am leaving this “Note” up for a day or two for whoever to read before I delete my account. Facebook, for me, has become a hemorrhoid- a big irritating pain in the ass. I can’t even find any of these functions that all you all doing. And some of these cost REAL MONEY???!!!
No. No. nonononono. I’m going back to Myspace only. peace.

Love it.

I recently decided that I’m supporting Ron Paul in the next US election, not because I agree with his policies, but because they are so out of the ordinary that they might actually stand a chance of shaking things up.

This post is partly inspired by an article that’s been sitting in a tab for over a month, waiting for me to slog through the 10 full scroll nubs it will take. (Can we get this going as a unit of measurement for the internet? My wordpress post writing thing right now takes up about 2.2 scroll nubs, for example. Gmail clocks in at about 1.8.) The post talks about terrorism as a revolutionary form of war, akin to the shift from traditional soldiers in a line to Napoleonic warfare, and in the process, there is this choice quote:

What if their objectives were more minimal–merely to create chaos, and the space for some kind of change? Their goals are rather easy to achieve–create mayhem. Or, as Lenin himself put it, “the worse, the better.”

That’s why I support Ron Paul. “The worse, the better.” George Bush was pretty bad, but look at the dem candidates? Any of them get you really excited? If you really think about it, is anything gonna be dramatically better? Let’s go with someone absolutely awful, like Ron Paul.