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March 31, 2005

thinking about making $$ on blogs

I have been thinking about how bloggers make money lately. Thanks Eric for the pointer to Matt Haughey's A Whole Features: Blogging for Dollars. The story of PVRBlog is pretty impressive. Matt has a good guide for how to make your site more relevant and more targetable by Google Adsense. I have been surprised by my own results with Adsense. I am not going to Vegas on it, but I am paying the hosting fees many times over.

The real issue I have with the current generation of mass market ad networks though is the cost to run them. The publisher gets the VERY short end of the ad dollar. Google pays about 35% of each ad dollar they take in on Adwords to their publishers in Adsense. Last year they pocketed over $650M on the backs of publishers. Is that fair? Doe sit cost $650M to run the network? Today they are the only game in town (that works and has scale). But how long will the masses (you and me) live on the crumbs? sounds like an idea for a company to me.

Posted by Martin at 10:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 30, 2005

Want to run your car on free Fryer oil?

I have been amazed by the growth recently of "greasecars". Basically a diesel auto that has been modified to run on Waste Vegitable Oil straight out of the fryer. What you need is a separate tank to heat the grease (since it congeals) and some flushing equipment to switch back over to regular diesel for starting in cold. Now you could process this into Biodiesel like my favorite ecorebel BioLyle, but that is a messy and dangerous endeavor.

For those who don't mind pumping grease out of the back of a chinese restraunt, but don't want to turn their garages into a chemistry lab, you can get people to put kits on your car. Here in Seattle there are a couple of people who do it including The Green Car Company LLC (Kirkland) and Goodwin Motorsports (Capital Hill) or Grease4Fuel. You can buy a pre-manufactured kit from Greasel or the granddaddy of the business GreaseCar or many of the installers have their own custom manufactured kits or modifications (like Goodwin beleives he has a better mousetrap).

In the last couple of months I have met dozens of people who have not paid for fuel in years. They just pull up to McDonalds and fill'er up. This is truly the American spirit of adapt, overcome, and succeed. Not for everyone, but I am keeping my eye on this area as the technology becomes easier to install and the grease becomes easier to get (look for filtered grease pumps in Seattle soon). I would expect the price of filtered, processed grease to be about $.75 per gallon at retail. Low enough to be compelling for the convenience factor.

Posted by Martin at 10:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 29, 2005

Good day to GoFishing...

When the Supreme Court is hearing a case that will determine the future of digital media, I say it is a good day to GoFish. My friend Michael runs this scrappy little start-up and they have a new agreement with IceRocket (thanks Mark) and a new browser tool and firefox plug-in. GoFish has aggregated all the legal digital media stores into one place and also added in related physical media (like CDs, books, tee-shirts). With today's totally fragmented digital media reseller market place, GoFish is a godsend. Can't find the song you want on iTunes, maybe it is on Rhapsody, or Walmart. Don't spend your time shopping around, just GoFish. And get helpful smart links to related physical items as well. Did you know that Herbie Mann covered Nirvana? That is a little known fact I could have done without, but there it is for the Nirvana fan who simply must have EVERYTHING!

Go Fishing!

Posted by Martin at 10:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 28, 2005

A good idea finally gets traction

I love e-mail. It is still my primary interface to everything (even more than the browser). There are some very important newsgroups and blogs that I keep track of in Outlook. I have always thought more should be done to deliver high value content in e-mail, especially that can drive transactions. Amazon is doing a good job of that with their targeted sale e-mails. But most web sites still consider their browser interface their primary interface. What about making e-mail the primary interface with occasional browser? That is the idea behind Google Watchlists. A friend of mine started Dailythoughts.org in his spare time (since sold it to hunger fighters) with the idea of delivering daily inspirational thoughts in e-mail. The value of the e-mails would be enough to get people to subscribe, then occassionaly they would go back to the web site to do something.

Now my old friend Scott Blum has taking the idea one step further with DailyOM - Nurturing Mind Body & Spirit. Delivering thoughts on peaceful living daily. Then occasionaly you go to the web site to buy a book you like or click through to an advertiser you like. I believe this form of integrated cross-media e-commerce will become pervasive in niches. People very interested in one category of products/lifestyle will want to go deep on that and get lots of media about it with an occasional transaction. Versus the current e-commerce model centered around transactions. Peace out...

Posted by Martin at 10:47 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 27, 2005

Phishing up to 33 million per week

Ouch...Linux News: Business : Phishing Attacks Number 33 Million Each Week. Have you been sucked in? This is the #1 threat to e-mail today. If you can't trust it, why? I posted earlier that Gartner predicted a meaningful fall off in on-line e-commerce due to spam. This is before phishing. I will be quite interested in the e-commerce numbers this summer after we have had a substantial flood of phishing. I expect them to still be up, but I also expect to see a meaningful haircut on the growth numbers and a meaningful number of people more nervous about e-mail based transactions.

Posted by Martin at 11:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Made it through Lent

So today is the end of Lent. Easter Sunday. I had a terrible time trying to convince my daughter that the day was about anything but candy and easter egg hunts (in the rain), but I gave it my all. You may recall that I gave up coffee, refined sugar and committed myself to more time with my daughter this Lent. How did I do? Well two out of three ain't bad. I stayed off the mud. Not one cup of coffee caffinated or decaf. But I still drank diet soda and black tea. Couldn't give up the jolt. This morning I went to Diablo for a Cafe con Leche. I swear it was the best coffee ever. On the refined sugar, when Alex fell off her committment to that after a week, it was hard for me to comply. Besides, the stuff is EVERYWHERE. With the more time with Finn, I did the surf day at her school and the kids still call me "surf daddy". I also did a couple other things for the school including parenting on the zoo fieldtrip. Didn't loose any kids to the gorillas, so I guess it was a success. How did you do?

Posted by Martin at 10:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 25, 2005

Just finished How Psychotherapy Heals

Just finished How Psychotherapy Heals by Chessick. It seems like mental illness has creeped into many of my friends and family's life lately. I have always been a bit skeptical about psychotherapy as a "soft science". While there is quite a bit of research behind how and to treat mental illnesses both chemically and through talk therapy, I have always been skeptical of the talk therapy part. It seems like there are so many factors that can influence the disease and the symptoms can manifest themselves in so many different ways that it seemed just talking about your childhood couldn't do much. But Chessick changed all that for me. (wow, google is great, here is the guy's whole address and e-mail Richard D. Chessick, M.D., Ph.D., 9400 Drake Avenue, Evanston, IL 60203-1106, U.S.A., r-chessick@northwestern.edu).

The book is written for psychotherapy students so you have to slog through quite a bit of jargon, but here are the salient points:

1. You are today are result of all your past experiences, especially the formative emotional years of 13-18.
2. Most depression and mental illness can be traced to some form of transference neurosis. Basically the living the present in terms of the past (rather than maturing emotionally).
"The basic definition of transference is given by Fenichel (1945). "The patient misunderstands the present in terms of the past; and then instead of remembering the past, he strives, without recognizing the nature of his action, to relive the past and to live it more satisfactorily than he did in his childhood. He "transfers" the past attitudes to the present."
3. The psychotherapy process goal it to identify the specifics of a patient's transference neurosis that is causing the current negative effects. By bringing it to the surface of the patient's consciousness (out of the darkness), there a high likeliehood of getting the patient past it and to integrate the knowledge and change behavior.

"any procedure that works by undoing resistances and interpreting transferences may be called psychoanalysis.."
"A certain time lag takes place from the time the therapist begins interpreting resistances and conflicts to the time they are "assimilated," that is, made use of by the patient in changing himself or his situation."
"...THE crutial factor in psychotherapy is the experience by the patient of the difference in reaction of the therapist from the reaction of the parents."

So the process has been a bit de-mystified for me. I heard on NPR yesterday that China has around 50M people with some form of mental illness. Society has such a stigma on it that most aren't getting treatment. With today's combination of psychopharmacology and psychotherapy, there is a 95% success rate with your average depression. Untreated depression is estimated to cost over $30B to the US each year. It is time we realized that depression is an illness that is treatable just like any other and it is not "all in your mind". Typically the patient can't just "buck up".

On the book review scale, I rate this a 4 of 5. If you are interested in the process it is a must read. If you have friends or family battling with depression it is a very informative read that will give you more perspective.

Posted by Martin at 10:47 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

DIY Raid First major upgrade...


Well I got all the parts for my next 2TB upgrade and installed them last night. I have got to say that the installation of a removeable disk cage, disks and a RAID card was WAY easier than the whole box itself. Here is the blow by blow...

1:30pm opened the case (after unplugging everything of course). I have an anti-static wrist strap but didn't bother to get it. I was sitting on my rubber work-out mats in the work-out room which work great as anti-static mats. The SuperMicro case has already 7 removeable drive bays in the bottom of the tower. The top is three open 5.25 bays and one CDROM. If you count from 1-4 from top to bottom of the 5.25 slots, the CDRom was in 3. The SuperMicro case I have for 5 new drives fits in 3 5.25 slots, so I have to move the CD rom up or down to fit in the new drive cage. Removing the space savers is a dream in this case because they only need screws on the side of the case that opens, the other side is a plug rail thing. Removed the plugs, disconnected the CDROM, removed it.

1:40pm tried to fit in the new Drive Case (Supermicro (Beige) 5 Bay Hot-Swapable SATA HDD Enclosure, MODEL CSE-M35T-1). The downside of the cool one sided screws is that the case has rails that the 5.25 inch bays slide on. These rails stick in about 1/4 inch on each side. The Drive Case doesn't have slots for rails and requires the full case opening for the full three bay height. After a little inspection, it was clear that CASE MODIFICATION was needed. The rails had been simply stamped out and bent down from the overall case. I tried bending them back flat, but the metal was too strong and there was not enough room for leverage or to really swing a hammer. (did I just sayswing a hammer in case?)

1:54pm Thinking how to remove the rails without too much pain. Can't see how to remove the subcase they are in from the overall case.

2:00pm. Hammer failed (not enough clearance). Pliars bending down the rail failed (metal too strong, not enough leverage). How bout metal shears to just cut the rail off? Ah, that is the ticket. But I didn't have any metal shears, so I get out some wire cutters. Not really alot of leverage, but they work in 1/4 inch increments.

2:25pm 25 minutes later and three whacked knuckles later, the rails are gone and there is plenty of room for the new Drive CAse. There is alot quite a bit of blood in the case (oops). . A little spit and elbow grease got the blood off the case and a couple band-aids stopped the flow from the knuckles. A dead weight hammer gets the drive case to fit into the new hole. Screws bend the case back together. Re-installed the CDrom in bay 4. All looks peachy.

3:00 leave the project for a workout
8:30 started up again. Put in all the drives. New Egg shipps OEM drives just in the anti-static envelope. This s great because for RAID you don't need all the other crud that you get with Retail drives. I already got a set of SATA cables with the RAID controller AND with the Drive Case! Way too many extras. I have bags and bags of drive screws too. The SuperMicro removable drive bays are a dream to install and the backplane takes the drives like a snap. Easy sleazy.

9:00 start installing the 3Ware. Of course I didn't bother to read the directions. If I had I would have read the part about attaching the sata cables to the card before installing it, but doing it after was not that bad. I had to unplug the game port card from the motherboard because that cable wend across the PCI slot I was going to use for the 3Ware, but the cable had enough room to go over the card so no problem. It took a little wiggling to get the card into the slot as it can work in PCI or PCI Express, so there is an extra set of connectors hanging out.

9:25 card is in, installed all cables. Had to look at the card manual to remember which was 0, 1, 2, etc. and connect them to the right drives in the Drive case. There was not enough room in the case after the card was in to see the labels on the connectors. Power supply had plenty of power for Drive case. Plugged that in. The 3Ware had lots of warnings about installing a backup power supply onto the card (just trying to upsell me), but I didn't do that and they warn you 100 ways from sunday.

9:45 plugged in power, crossed my fingers and rebooted. During boot I get a "do you want to install 3Ware Bios" for about 5 seconds then the computer boots. Just fine into Windows. But no 3Ware. it went by too fast. Re-boot and go into install Bios. Simple set-up the BIOS comes off the card I guess. Didn't need the CDROM. Choose Raid 5. The BIOS started to initialize the drives (write zero to every register), but I stopped that since it would have taken hours.

9:50pm rebooted, goes straight into windows. In Storage manager, there is a 1.54TB drive. Wow, cool! I say format it into Drive F and mount NTFS. Starts formatting and off to bed.

7:00am Drive is formatted, initialized and healthy. I start copying music and stuff there. Runs like bob's your uncle. No problem.

This upgrade was WAY easier than I had though. The physical part was harder actually getting the drive case into the tower, but the software part was a snap. the 3Ware even supports 64bit XP so when I install that i will be able to keep it. The real test comes when I have any kind of failure. Maybe I will pull a drive just for kicks. Well, now I have over 3TB of active RAID. Now I gotta fill it up....

Posted by Martin at 10:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Just did the IAT test

Just did the Implicit Association Test for the 2004 Election. Basically it tests your implicit associations with Bush or Kerry. The first part they flash pictures of bush then Kerry in random order and you have to press the "i" key for bush and the "e" key for kerry. Simple right? Then they have you do the same for "good" and "bad" words like Agony, crash, love, joy. Easy right? Then they want you to associate those words with Bush or Kerry. Easy if you have a preference right? Then they want you to reverse your associations. That is, if you associate Good with Bush and BAd with Kerry (based on your responses), they want you to reverse those and tag "good" words and Kerry pictures together and "bad" words and Bush together. That is the hard part. It is VERY hard to associate a different feeling when you have a heavy implicit association.
Very revealing.

There are also implicit association tests around Age, Gender, Race which may reveal somethings you don't know about yourself.

Posted by Martin at 9:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Blink, a timely read


Ok, so everyone else is reading Blink too, but there is a good reason. It is an interesting, and timely book. Tipping Point was one of the incentives for me to invest in Cloudmark who is applying smart mob technology to the spam problem. Blink is about thin slicing. Making decisions in an instant. Some call it instinct. Many people think instinct is just nature and it can't be developed or learned. Wrongo. Every input you have goes into your ability to have good instinct. If you spend alot of time thinking about internet security (as I do), hopefully your instinct on seeing a new company will be better than someone who doesn't spend alot of time thinking about it. Gladwell doesn't just use business examples to talk about things in the blink of an eye. He leans on John Gottman's ability to thin slice marriages, a professional gambler's ability to "feel the deck", the Implicit Association Test, and Ekman and Friesen's Facial Action Coding System for reading people's faces. The facial stuff is the most interesting to me. The fact that trained researchers can watch tapes of people with the dialog off and tell if they are lying, nervous, telling the truth, etc. My favorite part was when he described Clinton's face. It is the "I got my hand in the cookie jar, but you will love me anyway" face. EXACTLY. He had many things stuck in places they shouldn't have been, but had such a friendly happy face that most people (not me) forgave him. Amazing what you can do with a face. When we realize that, there are two ways to make it actionable. First, you could be more aware of your own facial contortions and try to manage them. On the flip side, you can pay more attention to your reactions to other people's facial expressions. Do you react in the predicted way when Clinton smiles? Is he manipulating your reaction and feelings at a very deep level? What do actors do? They act and get the audience to have feelings and reactions. Be ware of how you are being sold.

So I liked Blink. It was a good read and had a few tidbits that will stay with me. Not sure there will be alot of daily actionable items out of it though. Therefore I give it a 4 of 5 stars. Worth your time, but not necessary.

Posted by Martin at 9:31 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 24, 2005

two new music sites to play with

Eric sent me:
Last.FM - Your personal music network - Personalised online radio station
and
Audioscrobbler.
basically player plug-ins that share your listening habits with a server and the community helps you find new songs. You share your listening habits seamlessly. I am going to try it.

Posted by Martin at 11:34 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

A must have summer camping gadget

Ordering mine now... Hand-cranked travel blender - Engadget - www.engadget.com

Posted by Martin at 10:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 22, 2005

playing around with Paypal


Playing around with Paypal tonight. Set up a merchant account for Seattle Biodiesel. They are going to start selling some swag like jackets, shirts and caps. It was a snap to set up a button:












to buy the jacket. With a couple digital pictures and some simple HTML you can have a shopping cart on your site. Now Paypal has high fees, but the simplest integration and quickest creation of any of the shopping cart systems I have tried to date. I hope in the near future E-bay does some integration to make it easy to have auction posts and linked to your site as well. Why can't I have items for fixed price and my auctions on my shopping page? It should be easier and I bet it will be soon.

Posted by Martin at 9:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 16, 2005

Akamai acquires Speedera

Akamai continues to roll up the content network space. They have been in a patent fight with Speedera for some time although it hasn't hurt Speedera's ability to grow their business profitabily. I am a small investor in Speedera through another fund and am quite happy with the outcome as an investor. Glad to see George is keeping Akamai on an even keel.


Akamai to Acquire Speedera in Stock Deal Wednesday March 16, 8:51 am ET Akamai Technologies to Acquire Speedera Networks for $130 Million in Stock


NEW YORK (AP) -- Software maker Akamai Technologies Inc. said on Wednesday it has reached an agreement to acquire Speedera Networks Inc., a provider of distributed application hosting and content delivery services, in an all-stock deal valued at $130 million.

Akamai, whose services allow companies and government agencies to deliver Web content and applications such as advertisements and video, said acquiring Speedera would allow it to better compete against larger rivals. The acquisition is expected to add to Akamai's earnings excluding items, the company said.

Under terms of the deal, Akamai said it will issue about 12 million shares of common stock to acquire all outstanding common stock, preferred stock, and stock options of Speedera and its India subsidiary.
Based on Akamai's Tuesday closing stock price of $10.79 on the Nasdaq, the transaction is valued at roughly $130 million, the company said.

The closing of the deal, which is subject to approval from regulators and Speedera's stockholders, is expected to occur in the second quarter, Akamai said. It also said that all pending litigation between the two companies is stayed upon signing of the deal, and will be formally dismissed when the deal is closed.

Nasdaq-listed Akamai shares rose 13 cents to $10.92 in premarket activity.

Posted by Martin at 9:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 15, 2005

Today I told three entrepreneurs to not raise money

I have been quite vocal in the past about how entrepreneurs should not raise money unless they really need it. Today for some reason that theme came home to roost in spades. I told THREE entrepreneurs that they should NOT raise venture capital. Without using names, here are the scenarios:

Entrepreneur 1: Has a niche community web site around "peaceful living" or you might say "eco living". They have about 65,000 registered users who receive e-mails once a day an visit the site to read inspirational things that will help them lead better lives. The site has begun to sell some advertising and get some sponsors. They wanted millions of dollars to grow to millions of users quickly (ala Friendster) and create many cross-media properties like Oprah or Dr. Phil or Depak Chopra have. Now I am a technology investor so I don't really understand building cross media brands so I start out with a bias. But here is a site being run by two people in a basement that will be profitable on a very small revenue run rate. Why pour gas all over it? Do you really want investors who will come in with their own ideas on how to grow and push you to do unnatural things? If you really are passionate about the niche, grow into the niche with revenue and see how big it gets. Not every niche is an IPO. And if you take VC money they will try to push your niche larger and faster than it may naturally go. You will get irrational behavior. Don't do it.

Entrepreneur 2: Created a slightly profitable (on a couple million revenue) connector/management software company for VOIP and internet video delivery. One shareholder, the founder. Built the business with the only paying customers he could find through the dry years of 2001-2003, the world's oldest profession. Now that the venture markets are heating up he wants to leverage that work and customers into a "respectable" business and grow it like gangbusters. He wants a premium valuation for his company since it is profitable. First, private equity investors are going to have a problem with his customer base. For better or worse the public markets are not ready for a porn IPO. So the question is can he attract whole new customers? So in that way his current business is really not of much value and he is going to have to spin up a whole new sales channel and level of professionalism in the company. Against well funded venture backed and some public companies. I say life is too short for that brain damage. Keep your medium size business all to your self and take out as much cash as you can.

Entrepreneur 3: Has a digital media and software e-commerce system that has been in development for five years and finally has gotten a major customer. There has been alot of money put into the company by prior non-professional investors. The first major customer has an option to buy the company at a price that will make the prior investors whole but not leave much for the management team. The management team of course wants to raise more money, dilute the prior investors and get a larger piece for themselves. I advised him that if I were the prior investors faced with a return of capital or a cram down and further ride after 5 years of hard work, I know my decisions. As a new investor I wouldn't want to be selling that story to existing investors. Sell the company and don't raise more money.

Now if I could just see some deals that REALLY NEED my money...

Posted by Martin at 11:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Keep your eye on this site

My friend Sean Ryan recently left Listen.com (acquired by Real) and started his own thing in DonnerWood Media. He won't let me tell anyone what he is doing, but Sean is a very bright guy. I have high expectations.

Posted by Martin at 11:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Sifry on blog posting volume

More from Sifry: Sifry's Alerts: State of The Blogosphere, March 2005, Part 2: Posting Volume. This is no surprise to me. Spikes when big events happen. Then drops. But overall up and to the right increase in post volume. The interesting thing to track would be the interpost percentage. For example, this post is really a reference to another post with only a small amout of value added. With more blogs and everyone reading the few important ones, how many of the post are self referential and how many are truly accretive? (ok I can't spell).

Posted by Martin at 11:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 14, 2005

Biodiesel shows us the way for US innovation

Ok, I said I would take the Biodiesel thread over to B100fuel.com, but this one is just too good. Where was Apple computer started? HP? Amazon? A garage. How many tech start-ups today are in the garage? You get where this is going.

In the garage today are crazies with a passion. There are quite a few of them messing around with making their own fuels. Bio Lyle's Biodiesel Worskshop is a great example. You must watch the video! Check out the guy's garage. He REALLY makes the stuff from used cooking oil he slurps out of 55 gallon bins behind the chinese restraunt. With a little weekend elbo grease Bio Lyle is able to drive his car all week for free. This is the spirit of innovation that got us here. This is the spirit of innovation that will get us to the next stage. It seems that some of that spirit has been lost to software and tech entrepreneurs these days. Come on, go out to your garage!

Posted by Martin at 11:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

musing about community and search

I joined JetEye BETA :: Ask What You Want. Share What You Know. tonight. Invited by a friend. It is the first beta that I have seen that requires an NDA to join. That is a bit onerous. The NDA also doesn't really clearly spell out what is confidential. Is their whole concept confidential? For example, if I told you that this is a new type of social network meets search that is driven by members asking and answering questions, would I be in violation of the NDA? I hope not.

Anyway, I seem to be getting alot of plans around the idea of scaling up question/answer communities these days. I have checked out Wondir , metafilter and a couple others (i can't talk about). My money is on Metafilter. It is not a community paradigm. You don't have to set up an elaborate profile and invite all your friends to get value. You do have to pay a nominal fee, but that just is to make sure you are serious. You get a highly qualified and motivate community. When google ends, metafilter begins. Now back to community. Why would I want to join another one? I don't get it.

Posted by Martin at 11:00 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Bill Gurley sounds the alarm (again) on broadband

Bill Gurley's Above the Crowd recent posting (welcome to the Blogsphere Bill!) about locel ILECs and MSOs trying to restrict local government's ability to provide broadband as a public service is a timely and very important article to read. Basically the old world oligopoly of cable and telephone is trying to stall innovative local governments who want to provide broadband as a public service. Typical old school behavior. When you can't provide what the consumer wants and someone else (in this case a local government) can, sue them! Or pass laws that limit their ability to do a good job. As consumers we should be outraged! Broadband IS a public service. Just like water, electricity and garbage. More important I would wager. Especially more important for local economic health and growth. It has got to take ALOT to get local governments off their asses and into the market actually providing a new public service. In this case it is the collosal failure of ILECs and MSOs to do the job (with all their capital and power). If you see any of this going on in your local town, you should do whatever you can to support the right of your local district to provide broadband.

Now it is VERY rare that I suggest government can be good at anything. But in this case, you have at least got to give them the right right to try. They can't fail any worse than the ILECs and MSOs have so far. Competition is the name of America. Let it run...

Posted by Martin at 8:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Sifry on the state of the Blogsphere


When I first met David Sifry, he was running Technorati on a box under his desk. Today the service is tracking 40,000 new blogs a day totaling over 7.8M. The blogsphere is doubling roughly every 5 months. He recently blogged some of his analysis of this growth. I was struck by the following excerpt, specifically the comments on Spam. Not only is comment spam and trackback spam a problem, but now bots are actually creating WHOLE BLOGS solely for the purpose of creating links among themselves and a host site. Everyone tries to game the gamer. So Technorati is spending an increasing amount of their time trying to purge their indexes of links to/from spam blogs. I wonder how much time Google spends on that? Or how spam links are accounted for in the Google Pagerank?

We are currently seeing about 30,000 - 40,000 new weblogs being created each day, depending on the day. Compared to the past, this is well over double the rate of change in October, when there were about 15,000 new weblogs created each day. The remarkable growth over the past 3 months can be attributed to the increase in new, mainstream services such as MSN Spaces, and in increases of use of services like Blogger, AOL Journals, and LiveJournal. In addition, services outside the United States have been taking off, including a number of media sites promoting blogging, such as Le Monde in France.

There is a dark underbelly to these numbers, however: Part of the growth of new weblogs created each day is due to an increase in spam blogs - fake blogs that are created by robots in order to foster link farms, attempted search engine optimization, or drive traffic through to advertising or affiliate sites. We have been battling the spam situation in a significant way for about 2 months - prior to January, spam wasn't much of an issue. All of these charts reflect Technorati's databases after spam blogs have been removed, and we feel that we've been able to capture and identify most of the spam out there, but one should note that there is definitely blog spam that we don't catch (tell us if you see spam in the index!). I'd estimate that we currently catch about 90% of spam and remove it from the index, and notify the blog hosting operators. Most of this fake blog spam comes from hosted services or from specific IP addresses. One of the results of the extremely productive Spam Squashing Summit of a few weeks ago is the increased collaboration between services in order to report and combat this spam. Right now, about 20% of the aggregate pings Technorati receives are from spam blogs, so you won't see that in these numbers - these statistics show only "cleaned" data.


Posted by Martin at 7:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 12, 2005

ok I caved on the RAID

I had posted: Deep Green Crystals: My next RAID upgrade but today got shamed into buying the larger disks. What it ends up as is paying $1 per gig for the last half a TB and getting a full 2.0TB more rather than 1.5TB more.
Supermicro (Beige) 5 Bay Hot-Swapable SATA HDD Enclosure, MODEL CSE-M35T-1, New Egg, $113
3Ware 9500s-8 SATA PCI RAID controller, New Egg, $489
5 Hitachi 400GB SATA 8MB buffer 8.5 ms seek time drives, New Egg, $309 each total 1,540

total: $2,142.

Posted by Martin at 2:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 8, 2005

Soul Surfer is a must read for every surfer

So two weeks ago I was stuck in the hotel room waiting out the storms in LA. When the skies originally opened up I decided to try to wait it out due to the concerns about water quality as all the waste washed down to the beach. So I picked up a surf book for inspiration: . In a funny way it was inspiration. Yea it is the story of a young professional surfer who gets her arm bitten off by a shark, but there is a happy ending. As I read I remembered the fact that in dirty water (what we had in LA) sharks can't see so they bite first and chew second. A wet suited black leg looks allot like a seal. That was not comforting and Alex thought I was morbid for reading about a surf shark attack while waiting to surf. But the real story is about overcoming fear. About passion and following your calling. About the overwhelming, sometimes irrational pull of the waves and the ocean (which most surfers can attest to). It would be very rational for a person who had their arm bitten off my a shark surfing to never go in the ocean again. It is very unusual (and somewhat irrational) for that same person to go back in. What strength does it take to overcome something like that? The positive force must be stronger than the negative force. So Bethany Hamilton learned to paddle with one arm. Learned to push herself up into a standing position by putting one hand in the center of the board instead of one on each side. She learned to balance and turn with only one arm (try that). Her courage and strength is world class. Yet she is still just a teenager who is a bit bemused at all the attention. She really just wants to hang out with her friends and family and surf. But the agents keep calling. And she attends to them out of a sense of duty. Hey, the shark could have killed her.

That is the second very affirming part of this book. Sometimes it takes facing death to really appreciate life. Bethany faced death in the jaws of a 22 foot shark (which they caught luckily). She passed out from massive blood loss. She still has phantom pain in her arm that is no longer there. Every day is a gift. Everyone can use a little reminding about the value of a day. This book delivers it in the honest words that only a teenager could say.

I rate this a 5 of 5. A required reading for every surfer. And anyone who wants to be reminded that the world is not all crass commercialism. There are real true heros worthy of respect still out there.

Posted by Martin at 10:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Pleasure of My Company was not a pleasure

Just finished Steve Martin's new book, The Pleasure of My Company: .

Short review: Self involved insipid tripe.

Longer review: I have been a long time Steve Martin fan. I remember listening to Lets Get Small on my Sony Cassette walkman as I delivered papers in highschool. Watching Steve on Saturday Night live as a "wild and crazy guy" was a rare treat when the parents stayed out late. The first of his novel's I read was Shop Girl. I am confident enough in my masculinity to say that I liked the book. It was a good beach read. Nice and light and breazy. So a couple of weeks ago on my way to LA I picked up his new one expecting something similar. What I got was an obsessive rambling disorganized diatribe of useless banter with no point. I bailed out after about 60 pages and never even finished it. Don't waste your time. Come on Steve, give us another one.

One of five on the Martin scale.

Posted by Martin at 10:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Rainy day activities with the kids

For the DIY'er, click on over to Science Toys for toys you can make at home with common household materials, often in only a few minutes, that demonstrate fascinating scientific principles. I can't wait for the rain to come back!

Posted by Martin at 1:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Hydrogen economy could kill us all

I have been uncomfortable for some time with all the hype around the "hydrogen economy". Limitless fuel with no damage to the environment. Sounds too good to be true. Well I have found a guy: MagneGas who may be a whacko, but has some astounding claims about creating hydrogen from a regeneration process (like Natural gas the most commonly cited source). Check this out:

"We recall that the use of hydrogen as fuel does resolve the environmental problems of fossil fuels due to excessive emissions of carcinogenic substances and carbon dioxide. However, the combustion of hydrogen originating from regeneration processes (e.g., from natural gas) implies the permanent removal from our atmosphere of oxygen in a directly usable form, a serious environmental problem called oxygen depletion, since the combustion turns hydrogen and oxygen into water whose separation to restore the original oxygen balance is prohibitive due to cost. We then show that a conceivable global use of hydrogen from the indicated regeneration origin in complete replacement of fossil fuels would imply the permanent removal from our atmosphere of 2.8875x107 metric tons of O2 /day, with consequential termination of all life forms in our planet in a few years."

Lets see. Limitless supply of energy with only water out the tailpipe, but using up all the oxygen so we suffocate. Hummmm. Let me think on that one for a minute. And why all the hype around Hydrogen? In part because the feedstock to create the hydrogen is fossil fuels! It leaves the same oil interests in charge.

I don't buy the hype. I bet the smarty pants scientists will come up with a way around oxygen depletion, but I am convinced oil interests will drive natural gas as the feedstock and that doesn't change our dependence on foreign sources. None of the hydrogen initiatives adequately address where the hydrogen will come from.

Just to make it crystal clear, I am NOT betting on the Hydrogen Economy.

Posted by Martin at 12:10 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

March 7, 2005

Google validates one of my bets

Remember when you needed thick clients to do heavy graphics work like zooming and panning? Check out Google Maps to see the future of the browser. As my friend Troy puts it "click, drag, click". You have an incredibly rich graphical mapping environment in your browser without any significant plug-ins. And yes I ran it in Firefox.

I continue to believe all the interesting client side development will be done in the browser.

Posted by Martin at 11:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

unclogging the network arteries...

Ok, so I am running my Retrospect backup over my home LAN from the new RAID box in the basement. I noticed that it had taken 12 hours and still had six hours to go to back up 100Gig on another computer I have on the wired 100mb lan. That seemed slow for some reason. So I checked the line speeds of each computer's network adaptor. One said connected at 100MB. The other (the RAID) box said 10MB. The Raid was connected to my Firebox SOHO 6 Firewalls | WatchGuard Technologies, Inc.. I had thought it was a 100mb part like the other 10/100 hubs and switches on the network, but NOOOO. It is a 10mb part so the LAN card autonegotiates to the lower 10MB and slows the whole LAN down by 10X. Ouch. A little rewiring later and I have connected the RAID to another hub running 10/100. Back in the fast lane! Don't let a slow network part slow your whole lan down!

Posted by Martin at 11:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Climate Solutions pushes clean car legislation

The Olympia based non-profit Climate Solutions has started a campaign to get Washington to adopt the strict emission standards that California has. The Clean Cars for Washington campaign is print, on-line and TV. I have seen many ads on Fox, CNN and TNT in the local feed. Looks like they are basically trying to get people to fill out a web form and send it to their legislators asking them to pass "clean car" legislation. I don't know anyone who would be against that, but unfortunately the site is a little short on details. It is long on benefits, but short on costs. I was looking for a list cars that would qualify. Couldn't find it. I tried to figure out if most passenger diesels were outlawed (as they are now in California) and couldn't find anything on that.

Got to give them props for trying though.

Posted by Martin at 8:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A great vertical site

Is Amazon the answer to on-line commerce? I don't think so, especially for deep and complex categories. My latest favorite in this category: The Tire Rack - Your performance experts for tires and wheels. A very good user interface to walk you though what tire to buy. Clean interface. Shipment to local installers that are pre-qualified. This is where I am getting my new Avalanche tires (burning out quick from the Supercharger).

Posted by Martin at 2:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 4, 2005

How to convert your car to Alcohol

Convert Your Car To Alcohol. Out of print and printed in 1980 anyway. With the newer cars I am sure there is alot of computer programming to change. But I am reading for background. I am planning to convert my Avalanche to running Ethanol. With the supercharger it should be a gas!

Posted by Martin at 10:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

some infoporn

Tim Reha over at Venture All Stars invited me over late last year to do an interview for their new radio station. Just found the link today. I should listen to it so find out what I said...

Posted by Martin at 12:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Been clicking your own Google adsense ads?

You better watch out, Google is watching and they will sue you if you do it too much. Or you will go blind. I forget which.

Posted by Martin at 12:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 3, 2005

timebucks.org a second look.

Most businesses today are designed to separate you from your money. What if there were a marketplace without money? Without money you say? Isn't that unAmerican? Isn't is some kind of mortal sin for a VC to talk about a market without any $$? Well maybe, but watching the edges helps you navigate the center channel and see bends in the river early.

I have posted before about TimeBucks. They are trying to create local barter networks. When I first looked they were at about 1000 people and 273 in Seattle. The site has had major upgrades since then and the UI is much better. I can no longer tell the numbers of people where, but by the significant increase in postings i would guess the community is a couple of times larger. There were five new services available posted in just today. Initially it was all massages and no-one else. He has done a smart thing which is to add categories for services. Looks like "life coach" is a big one now. Everyone looking to make some kind of a change.

So there seems to be traction. I am glad. I added a business plan review service. Let's see if anyone takes me up on it and what the quality of the people involved are. I would guess pretty raw. But again, these are the edges. Interesting stuff could happen out here. Or I could just be wasting my time. I will let you know.

Posted by Martin at 11:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

LivingDirectory.net the open source social network

Lately I have seen a couple of community action sites using the Living Directory. It is a free non commercial, no advertising social netork created by two guys. The goal is to have a directory with basic hosted listserver and group admin functions that can be used by other non-profits to run their groups. People like PlaNetwork use it. Interesting idea. Worriesome for Friendster, Meet-up, Spoke et al. Who would have thought that hosted community services would also be under fire from open source much like Microsoft?

Posted by Martin at 11:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The collaborative Symptometer

OK, to follow up on my interests for this year, I have started a dive into IT meets Bio/Pharma/Healthcare.

This one is a little off the path I was thinking about, but I am in the bumping into trees part (the fun part). Healthcare Collaboration Networks: Collaborative Symptometer. Gencache has developed a collaborative symptom meter. It is in alpha. Here is how it works:

1. register for site. (gawd I wish more people would implement Passport or some sort of single credentials system).
2. start using the site. It is pretty confusing, but basically you go into your profile and start creating "health profiles" with symptoms and things that worked for you. I entered one for "lower back pain" and put cure as "core exercises with abs and back weights". That always works for me. Lower back pain is a sign I am not doing enough crunches.
3. There are 131 Genecacher's signed up and it looks like not alot of activity. They try to get you to enter more profiles, link yours to other people, search for other people with similar symptoms, and invite your friends.
4. They have the typical chicken and the egg problem. I guess the idea is that if enough symptom/solution pairs were up there you could simply enter your symptoms and get a list of highly qualifed solutions. But who is going to take the time to load all that? And there is no easy way to enter a symptom and get a solution that I can yet find. (maybe v 2.0). If they could find an easy way to seed the network... Unfortunately there is no easy "upload" like there is for my contacts to Plaxo or something.

Well it is after all an Alpha.

What I like: Use community experiences in healthcare to provide better health care.

What I don't like: No scale yet. Hard to police a large community for snake oil salesmen.

Posted by Martin at 11:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

hey mom look I have an Alexa rating

I wonder if adding this is useful?

I don't really see the need since it is hard to gauge the absolute meaning of the number. Maybe if people click through you make few more $$ though. I know Alexa does a good job tracking the top sites but I don't know if they are doing a good job providing services to the masses. Wouldn't you think they would be interested in that?

Posted by Martin at 10:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Posted by Martin at 10:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Factcheck.org tells the truth about Wallstreet "windfall" on SS private accounts

The democrats have it wrong again. I wish both sides would quit using the all too easy and available stereotype whipping boys to jazz up the base. The Liberals like to whip "fat cat wall street". They have been merciless with their whip lately against any change in Social Security, specifically that Wall Street will have a "windfall" from privitazation. Wrongo. The accounts Bush has modeld are very light weight and "hundreds of times smaller than some critics had assumed."

Hey world, what SS reform is all about is that the current plan is bad for beneficiaries. The math doesn't work. You have no control over your money contributions. The investment return rates are pathetic. You could do better with bank CDs. What this is really about is giving choices to young people so they can have ownership of thier retirement. Expect to see Bush using the ownership arguement more and having more success.

_______________________________________
False Attacks Over "Windfalls" to Wall Street

Summary


New information turned up by FactCheck.org shows that the type of private Social Security accounts being proposed by President Bush would yield very little profit to the securities industry, contrary to persistent claims of a potentially huge "windfall" to Wall Street.

What we have discovered is that the model for Bush's accounts -- the Federal Thrift Savings Plan for federal workers -- actually paid securities firms a net total of only 16 cents for every $10,000 in workers accounts. The TSP had refused to make that information public -- until now. It shows that fees actually being paid to Wall Street are hundreds of times smaller than some critics had assumed.

For that reason and others we find that ads run in Louisiana by the liberal Democratic group Campaign for America's Future are grossly misleading. The group is accusing Republican Rep. James McCrery, who is chairman of the Social Security subcommittee and a supporter of Bush's private accounts, of "corruption" for accepting campaign donations from Wall Street, which it falsely claims will "profit most" from private accounts.


Click the link below for the full article:

http://www.factcheck.org/article310m.html

Posted by Martin at 9:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

My next RAID upgrade

So I have a 3 full height 5.25 bays available in my case. Here is my next upgrade to add 1.8 TB:

Supermicro (Beige) 5 Bay Hot-Swapable SATA HDD Enclosure, MODEL CSE-M35T-1, New Egg, $113
3Ware 9500s-8 SATA PCI RAID controller, New Egg, $489
6 Maxtor 300GB SATA 16MB buffer drives, New Egg, $185 each (already $9 cheaper) total 1,110

total: $1,712.

I still have room on my current RAID so I won't buy this for another three months or so. I expect the hard drive prices to drop another $10 or so. I am ordering 6 drives to have one hot spare (it is a 5 drive enclosure). When I get the 3Ware card, I will probably add some of the non RAID drives now in the box to it and make a larger RAID. I thought about going up to the 400 GB drives, but they are 80.5 cents/gig versus the Maxsor 300 which is now 61.7 cents/gig. The Segate 300 gig is 69.6 cents per gig and claims a 8ms seek time versus a 9.3ms (nearly 15% better), but I have not found the Maxtors to be too slow so the difference isnt' worth the extra $144 buckos to me. If I wait long enough, they may come out with the 500gig drives and drop the 400 gig drive prices. It seems like the manufacturers just keep the same price waterfall and when a new larger product comes in at the top they just bump down each other product one level. If that happens, I should expect to be paying about $185 for a 400 gig which would be about 46 cents per gig. I bet I will be able to find it at those prices by the end of the year.

Posted by Martin at 8:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

My mother the blogger...

Well my mother retired at the end of February. She has been a reporter for a New York Times owned paper in Florida called the Ocala Star Banner. When she retired many people e-mailed her and said they would miss her saturday morning weekly column. So my brother set up a blog for her to keep writing! Saturday Mornings with Lucy. Now her fans can continue to read and she will own the copywrite. All goodness. The ease of micropublishing like this, especially for established writers like my mother, will open up whole new markets for these people.

Posted by Martin at 7:27 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

New York researcher turns wood into Ethanol and more

With a little bit of research this country could be completely energy self sufficient. I have said this many times. One more signpost along that road is a researcher in New York who has a process to turn wood into Ethanol with an acetic acid byproduct that is three times more valuable: SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry - Business Affairs Of course it is still in the university lab and no-one has built a commercial production facility on this idea yet, but the work is getting done. It would be cool to have a fund focused on commercialization of these many renewable energy inventions that are today only in the labs. The only funds I have seen in this area so far are much later stage after a facility is up and running.

Posted by Martin at 10:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Confusion as judge overturns spam conviction

The Seattle times seattlepi.com Buzzworthy: Spam conviction overturned gives a good clarification of the AP story about one of the nation's first felony spam convictions being overturned. It looks like it was really a technicality and that only one of the two convictions were overturned. All this shows me how complicated it is to get anything meaningful done on SPAM through the blunt instrument of the courts.


Posted by Martin at 9:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 2, 2005

Thinking about ad networks

Banner ad networks have been around for quite awhile. But click through rates went through the floor. So along came Google Adsense. Then affiliate programs aggregated by Commission Junction. Found this good thread musing about what is wrong with today's ad networks: SitePoint Forums - The future of ad networks. I wonder what the next genaration ad networks will be like? Will it be about coverage? (getting ads on sites without them) Will it be about clickthroughs? Branding? Will the advertisers be the same or different?

I read recentlythat Google made something around $1B on its advertising and paid affiliates $378M of that (I probably got the numbers somewhat wrong) If that is so, Google is taking more than 60% margin. With their high overhead I understand. does it really cost 60% - $600M to run the network?

Posted by Martin at 12:37 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 1, 2005

Why I don't have an IPod

Ok, I am going to be the last guy at Ignition to own an IPod. Maybe I will never buy one. I know Rich and the other guys are in love with theirs, but here is why I haven't bought one yet and may never buy one.

1. Proprietary AAC format. Buying into the iPod ties you to the iTunes software on your desktop for playing all your songs. And eventually video. I know you can just move your MP3 files over and it does play AIFF which is the lossless format I use, but at every turn they try to convert your songs to AAC. For example if iTunes finds any .WMA files (windows media), they will automatically convert them to the "import" format you have specified in iTunes (default AAC). This is just the ongoing "ownership" battle between Microsoft/Real/Apple for the music file format. As a consumer I don't want to be "owned" by anyone. I want one archive format and I want to trade out my playing software/hardware as it improves over time. Don't lock me in!

2. Apple uses the inferior CDDB for data lookup. When I was running Loudeye, I looked at all the metadata providers in the industry. Since CDDB was mostly user generated, they could not and did not enforce any data entry standards. That meant poor data quality and inconsistency. For example some people would put the artist name in the title and some wouldn't, some would capitalize words while others wouldn't. Now I know CDDB (now Gracenote) got a pile of venture money and tried to clean up their database, but it is still the worst in the industry. Microsoft licenses the far superior AMG database. Since data quality is key to a good user experience, I can't convince myself to use a set of tools and hardware I know are built on the cheapest dirtiest database on the planet.

3. Apple is screwing up the iPod as a hardware platform. Remember the bad old days of proprietary plugs and hardware interfaces? When IBM could charge you 10x what they should for disk drives because they owned the hardware interface. You thought all that went away with industry standard interfaces didn't you? Well you would be WRONG with the iPod. With the first iPod Apple did a truly remarkable job of building an ecosystem of vendors around their one simple form factor. You can now buy hundreds of add-ons like microphones, cases, speakers, even whole cars! But with the latest versions, the Mini and the Shuffle (and somewhat the Photo) they have blown all those vendors out the window. The plug spacing is different on each one. Even though the plugs themselves may be standard (but the Apple proprietary plug changes on each one), the space between them and the attachment to the case changes so all the hardware guys need to make a new device. Now what if I have an iPod Mini and buy the photo and want to have a voice recorder? I need TWO different ones. Why can't I buy one and use it on either iPod. Now Apple, the whole idea of a platform is compatibility and portability of applications and devices. The iPod is NO LONGER an adequate hardware platform. May be iTunes will be an interesting software platform (i am importing my whole collection now and benchmarking it against Microsoft Windows Media Player), but that is yet to be seen. Maybe Apple's strategy is to design in hardware obselence to force hardware upgrades. As a consumer I HATE that and recognize it for the crass greed that it is.

4. No removable battery or battery upgrade options.

5. Proprietary charging interface. And of course different between each model so you can't use the same periferals. Do I really want a different charger for my shuffle than my photo? Hey Apple, can you spell USB? It does charging and syncing AND audio out just fine thanks! Learn something from Blackberry that dumped their proprietary charge/sync interface in favor of USB.

6. No removable memory. I want SD please

7. No direct photo load to the iPod Photo. Why can't I plug my camera into my ipod photo? two reasons, 1. proprietary hardware interface and 2. proprietary data format (iPhoto has to convert your files probably). Silly. Hey guys it is just a big hard drive. Again, can you spell USB?

8. No video support. I had a long talk with Mike Slade (on apple's board) about this and he had some very eloquent reasons why video doesn't make sense. But I don't care. I want it! Yes even on that little screen (although I would prefer a larger one, hey my Blackberry 7100t has a larger screen!). That would be one less thing I had to carry on a trip to entertain my daughter (I now carry a portable DVD player).


So Apple, just fix those few little things and I will be a customer...

Posted by Martin at 10:18 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

The SUV of Segways...

Well it looks like Segway is not dead yet. First they tempt us with a four wheel bandit (that they never shipped), now they actually ship something cool: Segway | Models and Specifications | Segway XT. The XT is basically a ruggedized Segway with the new LiOn batteries, chrome wheels, and big bouncy monster truck tires. Range is no better than the existing HT (Probably inpart due to the extra 20 pounds), but it looks like fun. I wonder if they will sell an upgrade kit? The price is the same as the old HT as well which they have now discounted. Looks like they are trying the "premium" model strategy to keep price power in addition to a low end model. Interesting....

Posted by Martin at 7:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Look for PeerTrader.com

I have written before about PeerFlix. The online DVD trading community has gotten significant traffic growth over the last couple of months and is really starting to take off. I registered the Peertrader.com domain awhile ago thinking about an on-line trading community of many various media types. Well today I gave the URL to Danny up in Vancouver. They will run with it and expand their business. Look for it live soon. All the best Danny!

Posted by Martin at 5:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack