Don't call it a comeback
As of this moment, they're predicting Hillary winning New Hampshire by 3% over Obama.
I don't call that a comeback.
John Edwards took 17% of the vote. If Edwards doesn't win, who do you think most of those people are going to back? Certainly not Hillary after his unrelenting attack on her special interest ties.
Not to mention the fact that, to get the nomination, you need to win delegates, not votes. Clinton and Obama tied at 9 pledged delegates a piece. There are 5 superdelegates from NH and who the heck knows how that works, but either way, it's not totally clear that Obama will not sill win the vote of the delegates from NH come convention time.
I think Edwards should just quit now, campaign for Obama, beat Hillary, and be VP and run again after. He's certainly young enough. Both him and Obama are both about change and they're going to need to combine forces to win.
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links for 2008-01-07
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Ranking the top blogs and bloggers in advertising, marketing and media.
Dear Peter Kalikow, MTA: Wait for me, dammit!
This morning, my local R train arrived at 59th Street in Brooklyn just as an N train sat waiting on the express side. As the R train slowed to open its doors, the N train started up and took off, much to the shagrin of all of the R train passengers who wanted to transfer to the express. The N was not full and this is the second time this has happened to me in a week. I've been riding the subway almost everyday since I was 14 and if I had a dollar for everytime this happened to me, across multiple lines, I wouldn't be concerned about another fare hike.
Customers on the R train into Bay Ridge suffer some of the worst service the system has to offer because of the infrequency of service after rush hour. I've spent significant time waiting on that same 59th St. platform waiting for a local R to take me home after 8PM. Given that, the MTA should be doing everything it can to minimize wait times and passenger frustration on that line. I don't expect extra trains, but if a connecting express train is already in the station, it should never leave while a local is just seconds away from closing its doors.
This also leads to passenger frustration and stress, which I'm sure is positively correlated with incidence of violence, accidents, mistreatment of MTA employees. This makes what probably amounts to a 30 second tradeoff seem very worth it for all involved.
I'm asking that an express or connecting train never leave a station while another train is entering the other side with passengers waiting to connect.
Thank you for your consideration.
Charles E. O'Donnell
MTA Passenger, NYC + NYS Taxpayer
Christopher Walken on Path 101
We made a set of videos to give our various perspectives on Path 101. You should definitely check them out on the Path 101 blog.
I had a little fun, though, and decided to make Christopher Walken our Path 101 spokesman:
links for 2008-01-03
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"I am not a candidate for President," says Mayor Bloomberg, as channeled by columnist Michael Daly. "Not that I couldn't run if I wanted to. That $50 million Obama and Clinton and Huckabee and Romney and the rest spent out in Iowa? A mere bag of shells."
You don't own your social graph (Or, how not to solve 0.0003% of the world's problems.)
So this morning's tech news is that one person got kicked off of Facebook.
Yawn.
But, since Techmeme is the geek water cooler, I guess we should all be talking about it. I suppose Scoble is like Desperate Housewives or Grey's Anatomy--the shows aren't even that good, but you gotta watch because it seems everyone else is talking about it.
Today, Mr. Scoble got booted from Facebook for violating their terms of service... for running some kind of script that seems to scrape social graph data off of Facebook.
People seem to forget what "I agree to the Terms of Service" means. If you join a service, and invite all your friends to it, contribute all sorts of data, etc., don't get all pissy when you break the rules and they boot you.
Why?
Because these are the rules that everyone else agreed to as well.
If I was your friend, I wouldn't want you using some script to scrape my data and take it off Facebook. People seem to forget that friendships are two way relationships... those are people on the other end, not just data... and you don't own the data on the other people. These are people that looked at the Facebook TOS (or should have), were fine with it, and decided to set up shop. They don't want to live in a digital place where people who violate the TOS pulling their data run amuck. Not that I think Scoble is malintentioned, but unless he gets every single one of his friends to accept the porting of their data to another place, I don't see what kind of case he his. I don't remember anything in the "accept friend request" thing that says, "accept it when your friend wants to run a script that yanks data about you off of Facebook and brings it to some other place who's TOS you will never see."
Does the script take into consideration the privacy preferences of Scoble's friends, or does it assume they're all as public to everyone as they are to him, because he's logged in with his account?
When are the geeks going to realize that 99.99% of the world's population doesn't need or want data portability. Sure, it would make our lives more convenient if my I could see the restaurants my friends frequent through their credit card purchase data, but rather than try and convince Mastercard to accept open data standards, build an app with a simple hack that allows me to download it, and moreover, a reason to. That's what Mint and Wesabe are doing with financial data.
And as for the social networks, MOST people don't care about being on 3423 social networks at once with 43,000 friends, and sharing apps and data between these friends.
In fact, I can't think of a single situation where I thought to myself, "Boy, I'd really love to be able to listen to the music that my LinkedIn contacts do."
And I have no problem keeping professional contacts on LinkedIn and real friends on Facebook, and I'm unapologetic about it.
Last time I checked, real life was about different social spheres. My "real" social graph isn't a completely intermingled, open flow of data, nor do I want it to be. My digital life works best not just when it improves my real life, but also reflects it. I'm not friends with everyone. I don't want everyone's data. I don't want to show everyone else my data. There's enough of me already out there with very little effort on my part.
So, Mr. Scoble, please stay off Facebook if you plan on running scripts that the rest of us agreed weren't cool in the TOS. If you think the TOS needs to be changed, tell us about the app, tell Facebook, and gather support without breaking the rules first. While they've made mistakes in the past, Facebook seems pretty responsive to users when they gather a large amount of support.
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A little off-color Web 2.0 humor...
Q: Why did the porn site put MyBlogLog widgets on their pages?
A: So you could see all the people that came before you.
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This graph is what every startup should aim for: My month over month increase in Twitter usage
I think this is an amazing graph, because its not just about getting users, but getting each user to find more and more utility in your site month over month. Users can be obtained, but there's no substitute for this kind of single user growth in activity.
via Brad Kellett's Twitter Graphs.
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Immigration Ridiculousness
I just got this e-mail from Fresh Direct, my online grocery delivery service:
- The government spent money to go after people who came to this country to work boxing my food in a warehouse.
- Now those people will be unemployed.
- The warehouse will be short staffed and so I'll get worse quality service.
- Delivery fees will likely have to go up in the future because, without "illegal" workers, the labor pool is smaller and therefore wages need to go up.
Why do we even have any rules on who's allowed to work anyway? How is it possible that we aren't better off as a society with free movement of labor? If the best qualified or hardest working people get the best positions, isn't that a good thing?
Just out of curiousity, I checked out Presidential Candidate immigration policies. Seems like they all have some kind of bone to pick, but that Obama has the most liberal one, including amnesty for existing workers.
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Take note: I don't
My college notebooks are pretty consistant... pages and pages of a lesson title across the top of the page, and then... nothing. All blank. Page after page. No notes.
In fact, I rarely ever take notes. If I'm on an informational phonecall doing research, that's one thing, but for most meetings, don't expect to see a pen and paper in my hand. It's just not the most effective way for me to retain knowledge.
Does that mean I don't care what you have to say? Hardly! It means I'm really listening intently, and completely focused on not just recording what you're talking about, but actually trying to understand it... seeing the forest, not just counting trees. I'm trying to build a system of understanding in my head that not only helps me put the facts you're giving me into context, but will help me filter and interpret new facts that will be sure to come down the pipeline going forward--all based on what I'm learning from you.
And that's the most important thing for me. We suffer from information overload. I don't need more information... I need context and filters. I need you to help me build a method and system for understanding what I need to understand... not more lists. Because if I record your list, I'm sure to get another list from someone else, and see a list online, and before I know it, I have a list of everything--a universal set. That won't do be any good.
I used to laugh when teachers would put up new math problems in class and call on someone in class to answer. Those students would immediately go flipping through their notes. Sorry, this isn't a problem you've seen before. This is something entirely new that you're expected to answer given what you've LEARNED.
You're not synthesizing! You don't have this particular problem in your notes. You're expected to actually think about it, and for many people, that doesn't happen through notetaking, but they're all taught to do that. Take notes. That's the way we all learn, right?
A lot of times, if I've been talking to someone and they're taking notes, I stop them. The kinds of things you often take notes about can be looked up, while actual understanding isn't easily recalled. This is especially the case in a hyperconnected, hyperpublished world, where all my brain needs to remember is that you mentioned a "search guy at New York Times" and it will take me two seconds to look up his information on LinkedIn and remember the name.
If you didn't see the forest the first time, you're hardly going to be able to piece together the whole thing from the three trees you took notes on... and that's usually what notes wind up being: A piecemeal, incomplete account of information completely without context. Often times, this information often becomes self reinforcing and you can get led down a wrong path from it. For example, if you're an entrepreneur and we're having a conversation about fundraising, I might rattle off a few of the kinds of angels I know that might invest in your company given what little I know about it, but maybe I don't really know enough. You write these names down and then follow up by asking me for introductions to these people. My assumption is that you've done your homework and figured out whether these folks are a good fit for your business. Your assumption, however, was that I fully understood the nature of your business and suggested the best three angels for you.
On the other hand, if there was some consistency in why I was naming particular angels, and you understood enough of that to ask a question like, "Are you naming those guys because they're all in NYC or they're all likely to do deals in the music space, because I don't plan on keeping the company here" then we can narrow down exactly who might be a good fit. If you're just sitting there recording everything I say, you might miss that.
Of course, everyone learns and listens differently. Alex is a notetaker. He's got a nice leatherbound book where he furiously records notes, thoughts, lists, etc. That works for him. Brad works the same way and he's extremely organized about it. I often wondered if it was about creating a physical reference to go back to or helping to commit important facts to memory--or whether it was something completely different... some kind of internal blog of thoughts born from the meeting itself. Fred, however, I've never seen take a pad to a meeting. He learns by interacting, by poking holes, poking bears... He's a tinkerer. He'll never remember the three companies you said you were in contract with, but he'll think more about why those companies are a good fit for you. The next time you talk to him, he'll name you six companies you should try to do deals with--the three companies you already gave him and the three that are next highest on your list that you never ever mentioned.
Also, when I meet someone for the first time, to me, it's about relationship building, not one way downloading. People aren't information stores to be downloaded. In my mind, and for the way I work, they're applications to be interacted with. I'd rather build a relationship with you where I understand your interests, your market, your ideas--what you bring to the table-- nd you learn the same about me, see how passionate I am, etc... just two people talking shop and getting to know each other. It's all about leaving markers for me. I'll mark in my head what kinds of information I can rely on you for later, but not necessarily the details of what information that was, because I want to make it a great conversation so that we want to chat again.
To be honest, if this is a one shot deal and I have to quickly get from you what I can because you don't have the interest in continuing this, I'm really not interested. There are so many people out there with great experience that I believe you can get a lot further by focusing on the ones that like you, believe in you, and share your vision.
At the end of the day, we all have different styles and different methods of dealing with information that work for us. It's a bad move to interpret someone else's style in the context of your own and make assumptions about what it means. I don't have a notepad. I'm not good with notes. I find them distracting, they never really get processed and organized--they're not going to do either of us any good, so trust me, you don't want me taking them. I'll do the extra research immediately after a meeting to recreate a good portion of the lists you mentioned by connecting, tagging, discovering, etc. in exchange for being able to see the bigger picture behind what you were talking about. If you can do both, great.
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What I want out of 2008 - Politics
I'm going to write a series of posts on what I'm hoping 2008 will bring in different topic areas, and I'll start with politics. After all, when you say "2008", the first thing people think of is the presidential election.
Just once, I want to vote in an election with a candidate I can really get behind--someone with a proven track record of accomplishment and moreover, the ability to bring people together. Right now, I watch the political debates and I just feel bad about where this country is going and who's taking us there.
We're too busy talking about immigration and the military and we're ignoring issues like education and healthcare. We're debating whether or not immigrants should get drivers licenses and we've going a generation of kids in our schools that are falling woefully behind their peers in other countries. Why? Because candidates pander to bitesized issues people can have kneejerk reactions to. Solving the education problem in this country is too hard--its a complex issue, and so is healthcare. Most of the current candidates don't have comprehensive healthcare plans... why bother? Most of us wouldn't understand the economic or coverage impacts anyway. But we do understand big walls between us and Mexico. Is there really anyone out there whose life would be significantly improved by a big wall? No, but we can sure have an opinion about it. That's what we're going to wind up voting for... big walls and licenses.
And why the f are we still on the electoral college? That's got to go away. My votes don't even count directly. Some democracy.
Did anyone notice Bush just vetoed an Iraq spending bill? Um... wait.. if he doesn't support this thing anymore, what are we still doing there?
I'm still waiting for Mike Bloomberg to run, but the longer this goes, the more I feel like I'm going to get left at the alter. We need someone out there who is willing to rise above the infighting around getting nominated by our two parties...someone who just speaks their mind. I want someone who speaks about finding real solutions and has real priorities that make sense.
I'm usually pretty optimistic about life, but we're running out of years where we can continue with "America as usual". We're a land of entitlement now. I see it in the kids I teach. Few of them know what real work means--what it's like to really challenge themselves, because they never had to. We have a generation of kids that is having stuff handed to them and they think the real world is going to be like that. It's also the same kids that are getting our best educations available. Full support, no hunger.
In fact, we're doing a pretty nice job of coddling these days. Can't pay your mortgage? It's ok... we'll keep your rates low... lower than the rates of financially responsible people who signed up for fixed rate mortgages on houses they could afford.
Someone call you a bad name? Don't worry... we'll get them fired. You don't have to stand up for yourself. Screw free speech, because bad words hurt.
We're nitpicking about what words which people can say, and meanwhile we're choking our planet to death. We're the last industrialized nation not to sign the Kyoto Treaty. I have to be honest.. I don't even know what's in the Kyoto Treaty, but I do know it's an effort to treat the environment better and every single other country thinks its a good idea. It would be one thing if there was some competing treaty and then I'd have to compare the two side by side, but since we don't seem to have any answers of our own, it seems pretty ignorant to just stand here with our arms crossed and be the last holdout. More screwy priorities.
People in this country need to realize that we're all on the same side... to learn to accept differences of opinion and work together in spite of them. Pro-life? Pro-choice? Gay marriage? If we don't learn how to work together, we can forget about being a competitive, productive partner in the world economy and political scene. I'd like a candidate that understands that, and brings people together to accomplish real advancement--putting structures in place that will help us over the long term, not win monthly popularity votes. It's not Hilary Clinton. It's not Rudy Giuliani. Barak? I dunno... Mitt? Meh. Ron Paul? Eek.
Somebody... show me something... anything. I'm tired of America as usual.
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Ozzy/Rob Zombie Concert
Saturday night I went to go see Ozzy Osbourne and Rob Zombie at the Garden. It was a pretty good show and certainly the most animated I've ever seen Ozzy. Clearly there are some invisible cattle prods going on there.
Seeing Ozzy wasn't so much about the performance as it was just being able to get to see him, so I'm giving him a lot of leeway on the quality there. Whatever energy he lacked, the crowd certainly made up for.
Rob Zombie, however, was an animal. Here's a clip of one of my favorite songs, "Dragula":
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Actually tried to buy some indie music today (Kilsy)... Sucky process, but I still bought.
I caught this band Kilsy on TV last night... so I checked out their site this morning. Admittedly, I don't know too much about indie music, so must of the stuff I listen to, if purchased, would like the pockets of music publishers, not the band. That's why I'd rather actually go to show to be supportive instead. But that wasn't the case here, so I decided to buy some tracks. Headed over to their MySpace page first:
Yeah, um, not so much.
Ok, how about this PayPlay thing?
No, thanks. I don't want to register or join anything... I just want to buy music.
Hmm... I wonder if they have a last.fm page.
That led me to Amazon, where the album was actually cheaper.. a 1-click buy... until....
Jeezus... No wonder they've only got 103 total plays on Last.fm. Folks, you gotta make your stuff easier to get. Are you even making any money from online album sales?? Seems it would be easier to just give the stuff away and play more and bigger venues.
I wound up downloading the Amazon thing, but I don't trust it. I think its watching me.
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