My computer Crunk gets crunked (Gibberish is my native language (DrFaulken)) by drfaulken

MyQuire (Bandemax DOT net) by phouse

MyQuire has been acquired.  Mission accomplished.

Slightly Droll (Bandemax DOT net) by phouse

Ubiquity (Bandemax DOT net) by phouse

A friend of mine had me look up Ubiquity today.  It looks extremely promising.  One of the apps that I’ve leaned on considerably is Quicksilver and this seems like something in the same vein.  Here’s a demo: 

The demo is painfully Web 2.0 in all its vernacular and tunnel vision on improving how we interact with web pages but let’s face it, the internet sucks and could use some (maybe lots) of help.  I hope this project gains steam and hits beta soon.

Another thing I thought I’d share is ies4osx.  I suspect it’s painfully old and everyone knows about it but me but in case you haven’t and you need it.  Well, there it is.  It’s so clever.  It makes me clap my hands!

Hey Folders! (Bandemax DOT net) by phouse

This is kind of neat if you label your folders at all:  Hey Folders!

Epiphany! (Bandemax DOT net) by phouse

I’ve realized that the Invertible Matrix Theorem is like the friend that you “forgot” to invite to the movies with the rest of your friends but shows up anyhow. You know one of your other friends invited him but they’ll never own up to it. You understand.

Yep! (Bandemax DOT net) by phouse

Someone at work told me about Yep.  It’s like iTunes for your PDFs?  It’s actually really handy for anyone that has PDFs scattered everywhere.  Check it out if you use OS X.

Samsung ML-2851 laser printer review (Gibberish is my native language (DrFaulken)) by drfaulken

My DjangoCon coverage for Ars Technica [django, programming, technology] (Clint Ecker (clintology)) by Clint Ecker

I just wanted everyone to know about all my DjangoCon 2008 conference coverage that I did for Ars Technica while I was attending the event this past weekend.

I agree totally with Brian Veloso that the conference was probably the best I’d ever attended. The infrastructure and logistics provided by Google were second to none and the small, focused group of attendees was just right.

Here are the posts I made:

• DjangoCon 2008: GvR speaks on the future of App Engine
• Ars at DjangoCon: Build your own social network with Pinax
• Ars at DjangoCon: Day one round-up
• Ars at DjangoCon: What Django can learn from Zope
• Ars at DjangoCon: The Future of Django

There’s one more coming up that wraps up the final day of the conference, so keep an eye out for that one. I took a lot of photos while there which you can see in my Flickr photoset:

My Simple View of Chrome (Bandemax DOT net) by phouse

No live bookmarks, no use.  There’s been a lot of competitors to Firefox coming out of the woodwork but until I see some delicious support out of the box or close to out of the box then I’m not interested.  There’s plenty of usability guys out there I’m sure breaking down Chrome and its interface, I’m not one of those.  I’m a simple user with simple expectations.

We finally got an HDTV [life, technology] (Clint Ecker (clintology)) by Clint Ecker

We got a 50-inch plasma by Panasonic. Loving it so far. We’ve rented a few things in HD from the iTunes Music Store over our AppleTV which has been great. I’ve also converted a lot of movies to iTunes format and pushed them up to the AppleTV which also works pretty well.

The signal we get over broadcast is good too. The only thing I wish we could get is CNN and something like the Food Network. I really don’t want to sign up for cable or a satellite.

Here’s the pics:

From the couch

Dramatic weird angle shot

All the junk hooked up to it

Permanent secure HTTPS connectivity option now available on Gmail (Gibberish is my native language (DrFaulken)) by drfaulken

Tab completion on remote machine with SCP (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

I generated a public/private key pair on my local machine, and I'm experimenting with copying files from here to my webhost without needing a password. Took me a few minutes to get working, but now I'm playing with it, and I accidentally hit [tab] while putting together an scp command on my local machine.

It autocompleted with what's available on the remote machine.

That's pretty fricken cool.

Ilium Software’s Screen Capture software for Windows Mobile review (Gibberish is my native language (DrFaulken)) by drfaulken

À propos: Amazon Green (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

On the heels of my four-part series this week, Amazon has launched their new "Green" section:

I have my doubts about the real usefulness of some of the top items, but the CFL bulbs are the real deal. While I would never pay $14 for one of them, we did get about three dozen of them on sale at Building 19 for something like 17 cents each about two years ago. We noticed a significant drop in our electrical bill right away on the order of ~$10-15 a month. Bonus has been that we've had to replace one(?) bulb during this time, so we still have quite a few of them stashed away. One downside is that they don't seem to last very long in New England weather extremes, so we use a regular incandescent for our one of our outside lights.

[Completely unrelated, but what's up with the crappy graphics Amazon uses for their navigation? Honestly, Amazon, just use text. It loads faster, and looks nicer.]

Part 4: How it will shake out and conclusion (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

This is part one of a four part series:

1. Part 1: The Little Things
2. Part 2: Wind and waste heat
3. Part 3: Petroleum, plastic, and data centers
4. Part 4: How it will shake out and conclusion

PDF of the whole thing (2,158 words).

There are other ideas floating around, that might be of interest to private individuals, too. Wind turbines floating on neodymium magnets resulting in ultra-low coefficients of friction that generate electricity spring to mind. Even the smallest gust of wind could offset electricity costs for your home. Applied on a larger scale, these turbines could be installed next to stretches of highway where the wind created by vehicles speeding by generates power for the grid. The ideas get progressively more sci-fi and less based in reality, but all have research and/or working prototypes to support them.

Ultimately, I expect a handful of green power generation strategies to become prominent, based largely on a region's geographical needs. A landlocked country has little use for generators that harness tidal forces, and a country without large amounts of sunlight will have little use for a solar grid and might be better off with a network of small, personal, near-frictionless turbines to produce a great deal of power. This will have the secondary effect of changing power companies' dynamics. Private individuals and businesses may end up selling a significant fraction of the electricity that they generate back to the power company, as already happens on a tiny scale.

Rather than being a sunk, overhead cost, electricity could provide a smaller, secondary source of income in some cases. This is good for the overall health and robustness of the power grid itself. Rather than a centralized source vulnerable to operator error, equipment failure, or even an unlikely terrorist attack providing us with all of our power, a grid of consumers becomes a grid of hybrid supplier-producers. This has an effect on the dynamic of the producer-consumer relationship, too. The consumer has more power because they're doing more than just consuming. They become more of a partner in the relationship.

So while no single master stroke of technology is going to save the world from global climate change, or rescue our economy from its dependence on foreign oil, there are a number of initiatives that, in aggregate, are having a real, profound effect on our economy. That effect will only become more pronounced as time goes on, and these technologies that are mostly in the lab make their way slowly into the real world. It's important to note that while being green is trendy and gets a lot of press and has considerable mindshare, particularly among the youth, it's not this trendiness or mindshare that's going to create lasting change. It has certainly sparked social change, which is good, but as always, it is the bottom line that will be the driver for bigger and better things. It will be economic forces that determine whether we continue our destructive tendencies or move towards a more renewable future. My money is on green, because that's the direction the invisible hand is pushing us in. Green is, quite simply, how we do more with less, and create new markets while we make our way in that direction.

My new job: Project Manager at Condé Nast [ars technica, internet, programming, social networking, technology] (Clint Ecker (clintology)) by Clint Ecker

I made a post last week that I was going to be ending my employment at Stone Ward, where I’ve worked for the past two years. It was a really hard decision and I’ve turned down lots of jobs because I’m great friends with my coworkers and I genuinely loved the job.

However, when the opportunity came around to work for another set of friends at a really awesome company like Condé Nast and on an awesome publication like Ars Technica, it was an offer I couldn’t turn down.

As of Monday, I’m going to be working full time on Ars—mostly doing programmer stuff, but also covering events and writing up technical stories for various sections of the site. I’ll be joining a bunch of other full-time employees (including Jacqui) in the new tech capitol of the universe, Chicago, IL.

Rock on!

Part 3: Petroleum, plastic and data centers (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

This is part one of a four part series:

1. Part 1: The Little Things
2. Part 2: Wind and waste heat
3. Part 3: Petroleum, plastic, and data centers
4. Part 4: How it will shake out and conclusion

PDF of the whole thing (2,158 words).

Plastic, another petroleum product, is a problem in the making as well both in terms of making more and recycling what we've already used. Recently, a 16 year old Canadian high school student conducted a series of experiments designed to isolate organisms that might degrade plastic bags. After collecting soil samples at a local landfill, he spent 3 months culturing them solely on a diet of polyethylene film strips. He narrowed it down to four types of bacteria, and grew each on agar plates, and discovered a new species of bacteria that eats plastic bags more ravenously than Pseudomonas, the only known plastic eater to that point. Burd found that only 0.01% of the microbes' body mass was released as carbon dioxide, allaying fears that his technique, if implemented on a wide scale could increase the amount of greenhouse gases released during recycling. It's estimated that these plastic bags will take between 50 and 1,000 years to break down on their own in a landfill. And microbes have been shown to do the opposite as well: taking toxic styrene and turning it into a biodegradable plastic called PHA. Both processes have economic implications, and each seems to be another tiny nail in Malthus' coffin.

There are other initiatives being worked on, primarily in academia, that will have huge implications for our business and environmental future. Generators that sit in the ocean or river and harness the power of tidal forces. There are some problems associated with this method of electrical production, such as how to store this energy meaningfully, but these problems have analogs with other types of green energy production, like wind power. With enough interest, investment, and work, they'll be solved.

Other ideas surrounding the harnessing of the oceans include thermal energy converters. It's thought that the amount of solar energy captured by the ocean is equivalent to 250 billion barrels of oil per day. That means that each day, the world's oceans capture the energy equivalent of 33 years worth of the US's total oil consumption. Obviously capturing the entirety of that energy is impossible and undesirable, but any company that comes up with a way of efficiently harnessing just a tiny fraction of it stands to make billions. Quite likely they will find themselves in an oligopolistic or even monopolistic position, too, as the barriers to entry will be huge, and the absolutely large minimum efficient scale of production will prevent new firms from entering.

"Green" thinking is also driving microscale R&D. Electronics companies are looking at solid state storage as a means of cutting down on power consumption in the datacenter. As more and more of our computing and storage moves to the "cloud", more datacenters are required. Datacenters are expensive to cool, and it's quite difficult to achieve an inexpensive, efficient, useful power density as well. That means that a large scale reduction in the amount of electricity consumed by individual server components will mean that useful power densities can be lower, or more servers can be crammed into a smaller space.

The largest consumers of electricity in the server are the pieces that move, specifically the hard drive. This movement has the secondary effect of creating waste heat which must be compensated for with adequate cooling lest the entire datacenter overheat. So even a small decrease in power consumption in that one tiny segment of that one specialized market will have domino effect across many secondary industries. It's similar in scale to the standby power dilemma mentioned above. And when you see companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google moving close to hydroelectric dams to build their datacenters, or moving to Siberia to save on cooling costs, you know these concerns aren't pie in the sky. There are real economic forces at work that are more powerful than the constraining forces associated with having to build fiber infrastructure out to these remote areas.

Part 2: Wind and waste heat (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

This is part two of a four part series:

1. Part 1: The Little Things
2. Part 2: Wind and waste heat
3. Part 3: Petroleum, plastic, and data centers
4. Part 4: How it will shake out and conclusion

PDF of the whole thing (2,158 words).

Being green makes good business sense, much of the time. While you obviously wouldn't want a hospital run directly on solar power, it does make sense to build solar arrays in the right places, and wind farms in perpetually windy areas, and then hook these up to the existing power grid. In that context, running the hospital on solar power doesn't seem like such a bad idea anymore. In medicine, we manage chronic pain by coupling a long-acting opioid with a short-acting, rapid-onset opioid. The long-acting agent is used to control baseline pain, and you never use short-acting opioids to manage baseline pain because of the greater duel risks of overdose and dependence. These agents are used to breakthrough needs only. In power generation, the metaphor is analogous: renewable resources provide your baseline power, and your coal- and oil-based electricity kicks in only when necessary. Thankfully, exothermic reactions lend themselves to relatively rapid cycling and are therefore suited to "as-needed" use.

Texas billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens is seeing why it's valuable to invest in renewable sources of energy. Not only is it good for national security, but it makes good business sense to invest in renewables. With any non-infinite resource, the market is subject to the forces of supply and demand. When supply drops, the price goes up. If demand increases because India and China need their share of the world's petroleum supplies, prices for the US consumer go up, as well as the ancillary costs associated with anything that needs to be transported. As the amount of available petroleum decreases — as it's steadily and inevitably doing — these forces increasingly affect the way you operate your business. For a company like National Grid, eliminating the twin problems of scarcity and competitive bidding are good for the bottom line.

Civil and structural engineers and architects are hopping on the green bandwagon as well. The first of them jumped on because it was hip and different, and enabled them to leverage a different kind of brand image to achieve financial success. Lately, though, buildings that are built to be more energy efficient make economic sense. In Sweden, Jernhusen AB is harnessing the body heat of thousands of commuters that pass through Stockholm's main railway station. The firm believes that the system being designed can provide about 15% of the energy needed to heat the 13-story building being built next to Central Station. This system isn't even particularly radical. It's going to cost about $47,000, and will only require a few pumps and some pipes, since the ventilation system is already in place. I think it's a safe bet that a 15% annual energy savings for a 13-story building will more than cover even the short-term costs associated with it, particularly in a city only ~1,000 miles from the Arctic Circle like Stockholm.

Since every mechanical system wastes energy in the form of heat, recycling waste heat is also becoming more popular. Estimates of the amount of energy lost in the form of heat — expressed in terms of electricity — from smokestacks in the US alone is at 50,000 megawatts, more than half of what this country generates from its aging nuclear fleet. Initiatives to turn this waste heat directly into electricity are already underway, and can be built on small scales that make it worthwhile for these industrial companies to invest in.

An economic case for being "green" (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

If I were a venture capitalist today, I wouldn't be looking at Internet startups. While the Internet is a sexy market and commands a lot of mindshare, I don't think that it's the future. We're coming to the end of the Information Age. No, the problems uncovered by the Information Age aren't solved. Search isn't solved. Scientific computing as a whole is still quite nascent.

But we are gradually working our way out of this Age and into the next: the Renewables Age. Just like we're still using what was developed during the Industrial Revolution, so too will we continue to use and develop the goods and services developed during this Information Age. So while computing and information management isn't going anywhere, it will be superseded by bigger economic concerns. Namely, renewable energy.

I firmly believe that a few well-placed, relatively modest investments today can very probably yield absurd returns on investment sometime down the road. It would, however, be a very long-run type of play, and many VCs aren't prepared to make an investment that won't pay off within ten years.

With that in mind, I wrote the following as part of a larger essay for an economic history class about a week ago. What is interesting is that when I started the paper, I had no idea where I would end up. Like most Americans, I hadn't thought about the "greening" of the economy at all. I didn't have a conclusion in mind when I began. The final result was this, and I think I make a pretty good case for renewables and investment therein. At the very least, I have convinced myself, and I don't really know how you can argue against it unless you're talking timespans of less than ten years.

I've broken it up into a couple of shorter pieces because it's simply too long to post as-is. No one would read it. Because it's unedited, the beginning of each piece might feel a little jarring beginning on day 2.

1. Part 1: The Little Things
2. Part 2: Wind and waste heat
3. Part 3: Petroleum, plastic, and data centers
4. Part 4: How it will shake out and conclusion

PDF of the whole thing (2,158 words).

Let me know what you think…

Core Memory is an awesome book [technology] (Clint Ecker (clintology)) by Clint Ecker

I was picking through the books at Quimby’s Bookstore and found this book called Core Memory. It contains large format, high-resolution photos of many of the computers that laid the groundwork for just about everything we do today.

There are so many awesome shots in this book that it makes it difficult to pick a favorite. If I had to choose, I’d have to say that the Japanese NEAC-2203 created by NEC in 1960

Here are a few more:

Impressed with Ubuntu (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

I've been wanting to learn MySQL and PHP for a little while now, because I think it'll be useful in the coming months, so I decided that I should probably install Linux, rather than installing the two on Windows. (There's something about that that just feels wrong.) I have something I'm itching to build, and it's time to start picking up some new skills again. I've had a spare 500GB drive lying around for a couple of months, so I popped it in on July 4, downloaded Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron, and installed the OS almost as a spur-of-the-moment thing.

I was amazed at how quickly and painlessly the OS installed. Back in 2001-2002, the last time I made a serious go of running Linux (Debian), it took almost 18 hours to get the OS installed and configured to the point where I could use X. It took a lot of help from the guys in #linux, too. I never would have been able to do it without their help.

But this time it was as easy as putting the CD in, booting from the optical drive, entering my desired username, password, and localization settings, and that was it. About 45 minutes later, I booted into Gnome, and had working sound and networking, right out of the box. I ran the GUI Update Manager, which found a proprietary display driver for my GeForce 8800 GT — in addition to other normal system updates — and a single restart later, I had graphics acceleration and an up-to-date OS installation.

Total time to working install: ~60 minutes, including software updates. It was faster and easier than installing XP, Vista, or Mac OS X Leopard, and by a significant margin. In terms of ease of installation, I would rank them in this order:

1. Ubuntu 8.04
2. Windows Vista
3. Mac OS X
4. Windows XP

I also installed the Redhat Liberation Fonts following the instructions here, and pretty soon, I had non-crappy looking fonts. (You'll have to change your system fonts in both Firefox and Ubuntu itself to use them before you'll notice a real difference.) While they're still not as nice as Windows or OS X, they're quite a bit better than what you get OOTB with Ubuntu. And I'm not even sure that they're *bad* per se. I think they're just different than what I'm used to.

That ended my adventures in Linux for a few days until tonight. I needed to get a significant amount of schoolwork done which unfortunately requires Internet Explorer. I'm pretty well caught up there, so I've been booted back into Linux for the past two hours or so. In that time, I've gotten my laser printer working using the generic PCL6 drivers with Foomatic/pxlmono. Print quality is great, and I can even configure the printer to print as "draft" quality without messing around. I couldn't even do that with OS X.

My only complaint so far as that when the machine is woken from sleep or hibernate, there is no sound. Apparently this is a common problem with a couple of possible solutions, but I have not felt any inclination to try any of them yet. Maybe in another couple of days or so.

Hopefully I will be booted into Linux for another couple of days before having to go back to Windows for any reason. Alas, I am unable to ditch Windows entirely as I do some pretty intricate page layouts and PDF conversions from within Word, but hopefully I can minimize the amount of time I spend there.

To figure out for the future, should time and attention span allow:

• iTunes replacement that can import old iTunes metadata
• Figure out these page layouts and PDF conversion in OpenOffice, if possible
• Get my Blu-ray player working, which should be possible with mplayer and some other tools

My main focus right now, though, is building my project, which has some very serious monetization possibilities. Now if only I can get someone else to answer his phone.

I’ve Come to Hate the Tech Industry (or: Technology as a Lifestyle vs. Technology as a Business) (Tiny Screenfuls (JoshB)) by Josh Bancroft

I’ve been trying to make time, at least once a week, to sit down and write something substantial. Something more than excited gadget/software lust, more than a collection of 140 character microposts. I’m really enjoying it. I’m learning a lot about myself, my goals, and my motivations. I try to go to a place where there’s no internet connectivity to minimize distractions - I’m easily led afield by my feed reader - and do some reading before I write (which always stirs up ideas). So far, so good.

Yesterday, I was in Mountain View, California, at Research@Intel Day. I was there to shoot video and otherwise cover interesting stuff for my group, Intel Software Network, and our developer community. Research@Intel Day is Intel’s annual public science fair, where the researchers and groups in CTG (the Corporate Technology Group) get to show off the stuff they’ve been working on to the press. Most of it is future freaky science fiction-type stuff - a biological microprocessor, dynamic physical rendering, etc. I’ll have some videos, photos, and blog posts up soon about what I saw there this year.

As I was on the plane at the San Jose airport, coming home to Portland, I reflected on the culture of Silicon Valley. It is the heart of the technology industry - hardware and software, startups and ancient tech companies like Intel, side by side. Their names are all over the buildings you pass on the freeways. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a technology company. Usually more than one. There’s Yahoo, next to EMC, next to McAfee, next to Sun, next to Intel. And oh, look - there’s Moffett Field, where the Google guys park their private 767.

The airports, hotels, restaurants, and roads are crammed full of people who obviously work in tech. Tan slacks, polo shirt with a company name or name of some conference they attended on the sleeve, maybe a sport jacket if they’re really important. Bluetooth headset stuck to the side of their head, BlackBerry in hand, or doing that weird walk-around-with-their-open-laptop-perched-on-their-forearm thing. There’s no mistaking them. They’re everywhere. Doing business. Talking about business. Exuding business.

You’d think I’d feel right at home there, among “my people”.

But I don’t. I feel like an alien every time I go there. A vague, uneasy feeling like I don’t really fit in. It’s not just an “Oregonian in California” thing, or because I actively thumb my nose at fashion, walking around in orange Crocs, cargo pants, and a faded black geeky t-shirt from Penny Arcade or O’Reilly or ThinkGeek. I’ve got my uniform just like they have theirs. So what’s the difference? What keeps me from feeling like the Valley is my homeland, and making plans to move there (besides the insane real estate prices)? I’d never really given it much thought before, but sitting in the airplane yesterday, waiting to take off (my eyes being involuntarily drawn to the laptop screen of the Boeing guy in front of me, who was broadcasting how important he was by looking at some obviously confidential spreadsheet long after the crew told us to turn off and stow our electronic devices), I had sort of an epiphany.

I’ve come to hate the technology industry.

Hate is probably too strong a word, and that statement doesn’t mean what you might think it means at first, so let me explain.

I love technology. I was born practically surrounded by it, and grew up as a citizen of that world. It was clear that I am 100% geek by about age 5 (and remember, this was before it was cool to be a geek!). Every job I’ve ever had has been in the technology industry. Web development, support, QA testing, community building, and teaching. It pays my bills, buys me gadgets, and I’m not really suited to do much else. So how can I say that I hate the technology industry?

It’s because I make a distinction between technology as a business, and technology as a lifestyle.

Silicon Valley, and it’s culture, is all about technology as a business - all about the money. And that is what I realized I hate. I don’t think it’s wrong for people to be in the technology business - in fact, I depend on them. I need them, like you do, to keep churning out the improvements, upgrades, and new stuff that makes our lives easier, more efficient, and more fun. And I’m not blind to the fact that this industry pays my paycheck, and always has. In fact, I absolutely love my job. Does that make me a hypocrite?

I don’t think so. And here’s why. I have no problem with the fact that the business-centric tech industry culture exists. It’s a good thing. I wish it huge success, and I’m willing to work to make that happen. It’s just not who I am, or where I’m going. People for whom technology is a business go home after work, and become who they really are. I am a geek 100% of the time. I couldn’t turn it off if I wanted to. And I don’t want to. I choose to find my culture, the things I care about deeply, and obsess over, and do in my free time, elsewhere. I would like to think of myself as “in the tech industry, but not of it”.

So what culture DO I feel like I belong to? The one where technology is a lifestyle, not just a business. The culture of geeks, and people who use technology in new and useful ways because they can, because they see it as a challenge. The culture of makers and hackers and people who read science fiction not just for entertainment and diversion, but for inspiration. The culture of people for whom reputation, and whuffie, and being recognized for contributing something useful or clever is its own reward, and not just a way to make more money. People who learn programming languages for fun, and for what can be learned through the experience. In my culture, technology can be a business, but it’s often SO much more than that.

I devour books by my favorite sci-fi authors - Cory Doctorow, Charlie Stross, Vernor Vinge, etc. - and I yearn for the easy, natural way that people use technology in their stories. Wearable computers, data-enhanced visual overlays, subvocal communication and silent messaging. Direct, fast, effortless connection to information and other people. I look forward to a time when the exponential growth in technology eliminates more and more of the mundane, cruel, painful, tedious problems that affect us as meat creatures. A post-scarcity economy when we’ve finally found way to get rid of poverty, and disease, and death. The natural extensions of our increasingly connected world.

Now, I’m not a Utopian. Or even really a Singulatarian. No matter how often I half-jokingly say I’ll be first in line as soon as they figure out how to do a direct brain-to-Internet connection, there are things outside the world of technology that I care about even more. My relationship with my wife and children. Being a good person and serving others. Right and wrong. You could take away all of my technology and it’s accompanying culture, and as long as I had those things, I would be fulfilled and happy. I recognize and am grateful for the luxury of having time, and money, and access to all of these technological artifacts that I talk so breathlessly about. I recognize that it’s all “extra”.

This was my epiphany - this distinction, in my mind, between technology as a business, and technology as a lifestyle. It helps me make sense of the conflicts and irritation I sometimes feel when I see practically the entire world around me start talking about “social media”, and “Web 2.0″. Things that were once the sole domain of geeks. For a long time now, listening to non-geeks expound upon these topics twisted my stomach - even though it was the stuff I love, and have been promoting and teaching and evangelizing, I felt resentment as more and more people around me (remember, I’m surrounded by the “industry”) started picking up these tools. Until now, I couldn’t put my finger on why, but I think I’ve figured it out. It’s when they’re rooted in the business culture, different from mine, and eyeballing things in my world that they want to use for their own ends, that my hackles go up.

Want to hear something strange? Now that I’ve figured that out, I don’t care any more. It doesn’t bother me, now that I understand my feelings about why it ever did. I can’t explain why, except perhaps to say that now I know better who I am, and how to reconcile the two cultures. Now, when I think of the marketing department (of any company, not just mine) trying to “leverage” some social tool, like Twitter or blogs or podcasting, instead of feeling defensive (”They’re marketers! They don’t really “get” it! They’re going to screw it all up!”), I see it for what it is. And I’m happy to try to help them do it right. To impart cluefulness to anyone willing to listen (those who AREN’T willing to listen still make me mad). Business is important, too, and they’re just trying to do the best they can at fitting in with this rapidly-changing world. That’s a GOOD thing, one that I’m willing to work towards.

Now, instead of wondering if I really am an arrogant hypocrite for getting defensive when marketing catches up to something that was heretofore the realm of geeks, I can accept it, because I understand why they’re doing it. The internet, as a whole, is better off for having been adopted by business. Sure, it has its annoyances: spam, intrusive ads, threats to privacy, etc. But there are ways to deal with them. Would we REALLY prefer to have stayed with a wholly non-commercial internet, a throwback to the days where there was no free webmail with gigabytes of storage, comprehensive lightning fast search engines, and almost-ubiquitous connectivity, because no one could figure out how to pay for it all? I, for one, welcome will tolerate and coexist with the internet’s new corporate overlords.

See? I told you that hate was too strong a word.

What is a Matroid? (Bandemax DOT net) by phouse

This.

More amazing photos from Mars [space, technology] (Clint Ecker (clintology)) by Clint Ecker

The first is another photo captured the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s high-resolution imager. You can see the lander suspended from the parachute. This photo is taken at a very unique angle which makes it looks as if the lander will end up in the large crater, however:

Shown here is a 10 kilometer (6 mile) diameter crater informally called “Heimdall,” and an improved full-resolution image of the parachute and lander. Although it appears that Phoenix is descending into the crater, it is actually about 20 kilometers (about 12 miles) in front of the crater.

This is another photo from the orbiter, but looking straight down. The dot at the top is the lander with its solar panels unfolded. The dark spot halfway down the photo is the heat shield impact crater, and at the bottom is the backshell of the lander with the parachute still attached. This stuff is super cool!

Video of the landing sequence for the Mars Phoenix lander [space, technology] (Clint Ecker (clintology)) by Clint Ecker

These video sequences are the best parts of these expeditions. The reactions of the engineers as the nerdy signals come into the NASA command center get me all choked up with happiness :)

Here’s the video, click play to watch:

YAY!

Quietly influential (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

I chuckle every now and again when I see the MSM reporting on blogs. The usual suspects almost always turn up: TechCrunch, the HuffPo, GigaOM, BuzzMachine — as well as a smattering of the hot blogs du jour. This time it was Steve Rubel's MicroPersuasion and Passive Aggressive Notes.

I must confess some incredulity, because I have never seen Ars Technica mentioned in a story that focuses specifically on blogs. This despite being relegated to merely a "blog" (albeit acknowledged as an influential one) most of the time by the mainstream media when they reference a story that Ars breaks.

Now, the HuffPo is a huge website. Probably a little bigger than Ars with 5.7M unique readers per month. TechCrunch is markedly smaller, and GigaOM is smaller still (1.37M pageviews/month or so).

It makes me wonder why these particular blogs are chosen. Is it because the stories about blogs are by their nature more noise than substance? Indeed these stories are often widely hyped when they hit and will make their way around the 'sphere several times before disappearing like yesterday's newspaper. (The blogosphere echochamber at its finest.) Ars seems to be anti-hype most of the time. It's been known to take a somewhat dim and sometimes even contrarian view to what's hot in the blogosphere this week — "The Cloud!", death by blogging! — if indeed what the blogosphere is focusing on this week is even worth talking about at all. (Usually it's not.)

So here are some sites that Business Week may want to think about including, because these sites are the real movers and shakers in the Internet publishing world. This list is by no means comprehensive, and I make no comments about their content or quality of the sites, only their size. This list isn't sorted in any meaningful way:

• High-Def digest: ~7.23M
• Destructoid: ~4.25M
• Gamersyde: ~5.17M
• SB Nation: ~8.76M
• Celebrity Baby Blog: ~8.64M
• Confessions of a Pioneer Woman: ~6.05M
• Fark: ~37.09M
• BoingBoing: ~6.93M
• SeriousWheels: ~9.05M

For comparison, TechCrunch sits at ~7.5M pageviews per month, and Ars Technica sits at ~30M.

On the Condé Nast Ars Technica acquisition (rianjs.net (Hanser)) by Rian

So the hot news in the blogosphere this week has been the acquisition of Ars Technica by Condé Nast. TechCrunch broke the story on Friday, but there was no official word from Ars until yesterday due to an embargo. Anyway, in that time, there has been quite a lot of discussion on the valuation of "blogs" — or the overvaluation thereof, as the thinking in the blogosphere seems to be.

Silicon Valley Insider:

Ars' 8-person news operation will be folded into Wired Digital, which is run by CondéNet.

This is almost, but not quite, correct. Ars will remain its own brand, and will retain its own staffing. Ars will not be "folded" into Wired, though they will continue to exist under the Wired Digital umbrella (which is turn is owned by CN). In a very real sense, they will be friendly competitors. This is not unlike two newspapers owned by a larger parent company competing with one another in overlapping geographic territories. (A common practice in traditional print media.)

I guess I'm a little bit stuck on calling Ars a "blog", however. Ars is a news site with real, investigative reporting and thoughtful analysis, longer, multi-page in-depth investigative and explanatory pieces and guides, and has been around since before people had even heard the word "blog". If anything Ars is a news site and a focused blog network all rolled into a single brand. (As opposed to the old Weblogs, Inc. model where each blog was separate and had its own flavor.) The journals section of the site combines six different journals under one umbrella — each of which has a large enough audience on their own to be considered very successful. Particularly Infinite Loop and Opposable Thumbs.

On the $25 million

There was a collective gasp in the blogosphere over the price commanded by Ars. Frankly, I'm not really sure why. When I first heard the number, I thought it was low, given the amount of traffic that Ars gets, which is different than the traffic that sources that measure such things think.

The usual suspects like Comscore and Alexa are referenced as though they're absolutes. The truth is that Alexa is horribly inaccurate, as anyone who runs a website with a tech-savvy audience will tell you. (Who do you know that uses the Alexa toolbar?) Nonetheless, these same sites will turn around and quote the stats as though they're somehow magically more meaningful for another web property. It doesn't really make a lot of sense if you stop and think about it.

Maroon Ventures:

Some key stats:

• Purchase Price $25,000,000
• Monthly Unique Visitors: 1,500,000
• Monthly Pageviews: 4,000,000

Okay, let's have some fun. Let's assume that this acquisition helps set the market price for the internet blog pure play. What it this acquisition telling us?

• Value of the Monthly Unique User: $16.65/unique
• Value of the Monthly Pageview: $6.25/pageview

Unfortunately, these numbers aren't correct, no matter what TechCrunch would have you believe, but to be fair to Chris, Ken hadn't posted the official word until yesterday. As far as TechCrunch is concerned, more diligent reporting would have led to Federated Media's information page on Ars for potential advertisers — so they should know better.

Here's the official word on the acquisition, straight from the horse's mouth:

We have an amazing community, both in terms of its size (5+ million readers, as tracked privately by Quantcast) and in terms of its contributions (12 million posts, thousands upon thousands of news tips, recommendations, and corrections). Our community is unparalleled, in my not so humble opinion, and it's a big reason why this year we're serving more than 30 million page views each month. (I've seen lots of folks citing Comscore numbers… they're horribly, horribly wrong).

Now you might think that the $25 million isn't so unreasonable. Taking a look at the old Federated Media advertising numbers^[1], you can see that Ars commands about $38 per thousand pageviews.

30,000,000 / 1,000 * $38 * 3 ads on each page = $3,420,000

That's $3.42M per month in advertising revenue that Ars is generating. Yes, FM takes a cut of that, but Ars has other, smaller revenue sources, such as affiliate referal dollars and Ars-branded merchandise for sale, so we'll call the difference a wash.

Now that's revenue, not profit. There're 8 full-time employees, as well as webhosting for the main site, the cost of the CDN (they've been using CacheFly to serve all static content), the cost of the discussion forums (currently a hosted solution: groupee's eve product) as well as several ICs that do web development, CMS development and other technical work for them.

A typical business acquisition is 3-5x annual profit^[2], so that means the four main founders (Ken, Jon, Ben Rota, and Panders) were taking in an annual profit of ~$6.25M per year split however they were splitting it.

Final thoughts

I often wonder why such blatantly incorrect numbers are often bandied about when the truth is usually freely available if you look for it. It's no secret just how many pageviews Ars has been doing: they're posted on Federated Media's website for anyone who wants to advertise there. And you can bet your shiny metal ass that they're accurate — and more likely (*gasp*) conservative. When millions of dollars are changing hands on a monthly basis, there are very accurate accounting measures going to be built in so buyers can have faith that they're getting what they pay for.

And for those wondering whether Ars is or is not going to jump the shark, I have two thoughts for you:

First, this isn't the first time Ars Technica has been part of an online network. Early readers of Ars may recall that Ars was once part of the now-defunct Maximum PC network. Then, as now, the larger and more focused you are, the more you command in CPM rates.

Second, having known Jon and Ken since 2000, I can say with a great deal of personal conviction that Ars isn't going anywhere, and that thing most certainly will change, but they will change because that's what the guys steering the ship (Ken, Jon, and possibly Eric) want — not because it's what Condé Nast wants. So if you see something change in the future, you can feel free to continue pointing the finger at the founders, not at Condé Nast.

Footnotes:
[1]I've linked to a screenshot because the original FM link will inevitably disappear in the near future as Ars Technica will no longer be outsourcing their advertising to Federated Media.

[2]This will obviously change depending on your industry.

Brightkite, easy to use, location based "Twitter" and photos [internet, life, social networking, technology] (Clint Ecker (clintology)) by Clint Ecker

Long title, huh? I was going to write out a thoughtful post about Brightkite and why I’m kind of warming up to it, but Herschell’s vertigo-addled brain did all the work for me:

My first text to the brightkite servers was relatively painless and took the same amount of time as it would to tweet it (on Twitter). All I did was send “? LOCATION” to BrightKite’s SMS # and in seconds, BKite (see what I did there? heheh) asked me to verify WHICH LOCATION, in which I replied “1? and PRESTO CHANGE-O! Internets! YAY. Bonus points for the seamless integration with my Twitter acct! HOORAH.

Let me put my use case Friday evening here. Me and Jacqui are hanging out at one our favorite places for drinks downtown, a champagne bar. I have already made a “contact” in my iPhone for the Brightkite service called “bk”.

I send an SMS to ‘bk’ with the following:

@?Pop's for champagne

to which the servers reply with a listing of the possible matches and their addresses—the correct location was the first. So I reply with:

1

And like magic, Brightkite has updated my current location, what business I’m at, broadcasts that to Twitter (which I have previously approved), and even updates my location in FireEagle which could, in turn update many other geo-spatial services that support FireEagle!

The real tipping point for this sort of thing will be in June of this year when Apple releases iPhone OS 2.0 and we can start running 3rd party applications.

Source: Steve Jobs’ slides from March 6 SDK event

Why then? You may ask. Sure, there are cell phones out there now that have GPS built in that allow you to do some of this cool stuff. But there were also a lot of cell phones in the past 10 years with “web browsers” and mobile browsing didn’t catch on in a BIG way until Apple made it easy and powerful by porting Safari to a mobile platform.

So with 3rd party applications, and even without real GPS, developers will be able to get a “good enough” location on your iPhone and transmit it wherever you want. I might be sending mine to Brightkite, or FireEagle. Or using it to geo-tag the photos I snap on my iPhone and send to Flickr.

And speaking of photos, you can email photos to BrightKite from your phone and they get tagged with your current location. It’s only short leap of deduction that BrightKite could relay those photos onto Flickr with geo-encoding intact.

I am really looking forward to June!

Dealing with information overload [internet, technology] (Clint Ecker (clintology)) by Clint Ecker

How I skim my “high volume” feeds: information overload from Clint Ecker on Vimeo.

I’ve long thought it would be interesting to make a video of how people with tons of feeds skim them and pull out interesting information.

This is my “high volume” folder which holds posts from sites which post 10+ more items a day and which I could “mark all as read” and not miss much.

When I skim through these posts, this is how I do it. Each post probably gets less than a second to catch my attention. You can definitely see which posts get a bit more time than others. The one with the couple having sex was pretty interesting ;)

Related reading: RSS organization systems, how about you?