Nice design story.
eBay overhauls its feedback system
From Nicholas Carr’s Blog…
EBay has been struggling for some time with growing discontent among its members, and it has rolled out a series of new controls and regulations to try to stem the erosion of trust in its market. At the end of last month, it announced sweeping changes to its feedback system, setting up more “non-public” communication channels and, most dramatically, curtailing the ability of sellers to leave negative feedback on buyers. It turns out that feedback ratings were being used as weapons to deter buyers from leaving negative feedback about sellers…
This is an intriguing — and sobering — moment.
BlackBerry rage
From Technology Review…
Research in Motion Ltd. said customers in the United States and Canada ”experienced intermittent delays” for about three hours Monday beginning about 3:30 p.m. EST. RIM said no messages were lost, and voice and text messaging services were unaffected.
”It is too early to determine root cause at this time, but RIM does have a team addressing this issue in order to define the problem and prevent it in the future,” the company said in a statement.
The BlackBerry service, which lets users check e-mail and access other data, has become a lifeline for many business executives and is increasingly popular among consumers with smart phones like the BlackBerry Pearl.
Outages have been rare in the BlackBerry’s nine-year history, but when they do hit, subscribers who have become addicted to the gadgets are quick to unleash their fury.
”I’m mad — it’s enough already,” said a frustrated Stuart Gold, who said he gets 1,000 e-mails a day as director of field marketing for Web analytics company Omniture Inc.
Gold, who worked most of Monday on a laptop while traveling, plans to ask his company to buy him a backup smart phone from a rival like Palm Inc., which makes the Treo, in case BlackBerry service goes on the blink again.
”I don’t know what happened, I don’t care what happened. They need to save their excuses for someone who cares,” Gold said…
Solipsism
Robert Scoble visited Switzerland and insisted on telling us about it thus:
What was really fun was having raclette cheese dinner with famous author Bruce Sterling. Of course I intruded on the dinner with my cell phone camera. It’s a 40 minute video, where Laurent and Pierre explain raclette. What’s really interesting is that we had people all over the world who were watching us live. At about 9:30 we sit down with Bruce Sterling, famous science fiction author.
It doesn’t get interesting until about 13 minutes when Bruce tells us the difference between a blogger and a novelist.
At 20 minutes in we discover that Yahoo has rejected Microsoft’s bid so you hear our initial opinions…
Wow! “Famous author Bruce Sterling”, eh? What really struck me was the confident way Scoble thinks that his admiring public would be willing to sit through 13 minutes of aimless chat to get to what he regards as a really interesting bit. Who does he think we are? And, more importantly, who does he think he is?
James Cridland wasn’t impressed, either.
What all this reminds me of is what the Nobel laureate, Herbert Simon, said to a journalist who asked him what newspapers he read. “None”, said Herb, before going on to explain that at his age time was precious and he wasn’t going to waste it on reading stuff to which people hadn’t devoted much time or thought.
Why does Microsoft want Yahoo?
Ed Felten’s been thinking about the question. Here’s his analysis:
Last week Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo at a big premium over Yahoo’s current stock price; and Google complained vehemently that Microsoft’s purchase of Yahoo would reduce competition. There’s been tons of commentary about this. Here’s mine.
The first question to ask is why Microsoft made such a high offer for Yahoo. One possibility is that Microsoft thinks the market had drastically undervalued Yahoo, making it a good investment even at a big markup. This seems unlikely.
A more plausible theory is that Microsoft thinks Yahoo is a lot more valuable when combined with Microsoft than it would be on its own. Why might this be? There are two plausible theories.
The synergy theory says that combining Yahoo’s businesses with Microsoft’s businesses creates lots of extra value, that is that the whole is much more profitable than the parts would be separately.
The market structure theory says that Microsoft benefits from Yahoo’s presence in the market (as a counterweight to Google), that Microsoft worried that Yahoo’s market position was starting to slip, so Microsoft acted to prop up Yahoo by giving Yahoo credible access to capital and strong management. In this theory, Microsoft cares less (or not at all) about actually combining the businesses, and wants mostly to keep Google from capturing Yahoo’s market share.
My guess is that both theories have some merit — that Microsoft’s offer is both offensive (seeking synergies) and defensive (maintaining market structure).
What — no comments?
I sometimes get emails from readers which begin, with a reproachful air, “Since you don’t allow comments on your blog I’m emailing…”. Which is fine by me. But a post on James Cridland’s blog made me stop and think: why no comments here?
Three main reasons. The first is time, shortage of. I’m busy enough as it is. If people took the trouble to comment, then I would feel obliged to reply properly to what they wrote. As a result, blogging would take up more time, and I would do less of it. That doesn’t mean, incidentally, that I don’t admire bloggers like Quentin or Ed Felten, who do allow comments and invariably respond fully and thoughtfully. I just wish I had their capacity for hard work.
Secondly, although it’s nice to have readers (and I have no idea how many there are, because I’ve never done any kind of tracking) and I’m glad that people find this stuff worth reading and linking to, fundamentally I keep a blog for myself. I started blogging in 1998, and for the first three years or so, my blog was private. It was a personal notebook in which I kept stuff that I thought was noteworthy or useful. Because it had a search engine, it meant I could always cheat my poor memory by retrieving stuff instantly. (This, incidentally, is what started Tim Berners-Lee on the path that led to the invention of the Web.) I knew that if I had blogged about something I would always be able to find it again. This philosophy survived the switch to public blogging which took place, I think, sometime after 9/11. It’s just now that my personal notebook is publicly available to anyone who wants it.
Thirdly, one reason I took to blogging was because of Dave Winer, someone I’ve always admired, and whose Userland software I used for years. Following a link from James Cridland, I alighted on Dave’s argument about why a commenting facility is not a sine qua non for a blog. Here’s the relevant passage:
Do comments make it a blog? Do the lack of comments make it not a blog? Well actually, my opinion is different from many, but it still is my opinion that it does not follow that a blog must have comments, in fact, to the extent that comments interfere with the natural expression of the unedited voice of an individual, comments may act to make something not a blog.
We already had mail lists before we had blogs. The whole notion that blogs should evolve to become mail lists seems to waste the blogs. Comments are very much mail-list-like things. A few voices can drown out all others. The cool thing about blogs is that while they may be quiet, and it may be hard to find what you’re looking for, at least you can say what you think without being shouted down. This makes it possible for unpopular ideas to be expressed. And if you know history, the most important ideas often are the unpopular ones.
Me, I like diversity of opinion. I learn from the extremes. You think evolution is a liberal plot? Okay, I disagree, but I think you should have the right to say it, and further you should have a place to say it. You think global warming is a lie? Speak your mind brother. You thought the war in Iraq was a bad idea? Thank god you had a place you could say that. That’s what’s important about blogs, not that people can comment on your ideas. As long as they can start their own blog, there will be no shortage of places to comment. What there is always a shortage of, however, is courage to say the exceptional thing, to be an individual, to stand up for your beliefs, even if they aren’t popular.
The advent (and exponential growth) of comment spam confirms the wisdom of being chary of allowing comments. I’m responsible for a couple of other blogs which do allow them, and one of my daily chores is weeding out the fake comments by pornographers and other online hoodlums which have got past the filter. Life’s too short for this.
Tulip mania (contd.)
My excuse: I wanted to see how my old 85 mm manual AI Nikkor lens worked with the D200. Conclusion: pretty well (though of course now its equivalent focal length is 85 x 1.5 = 127.5 mm).
Turkey flights
This morning’s Observer column…
It’s the metaphors and similes that get me. It’s a shotgun marriage, declared one commentator, ‘with Google holding the gun’. Putting Microsoft and Yahoo together, said another, was like trying to produce an eagle from an alliance of two turkeys. This is unfair. Microsoft isn’t a turkey, but a profitable, boring mastodon that entertains fantasies about being able to fly. Yahoo, for its part, is an ageing hippy who invented hang- gliding but aspired to fly 747s and then discovered that he wasn’t very good at it. The mastodon hopes that by employing the hippy it will learn to hang-glide. The hippy’s feelings about the whole deal are plain for all to see…Update: The NYT (and lots of other sources) claim that the Yahoo board has decided to reject the Microsoft bid, on the grounds that it undervalues the company. Ho! If this is true then what’s likely to happen is that (a) some big Yahoo shareholders will revolt and (b) Microsoft will wage a proxy war with the aim of eplacing the Yahoo board at the next AGM. This one will run and, er, ruin. There are also ways you can get to buy ar-15’s from Palmetto State Armory where you can make sure you are safe and also get the right equipment.
Uptake of Firefox in Europe
Interesting map, courtesy of Seb Schmoller.
Highest in Finland, lowest in Netherlands. UK third from bottom. Shame on us.
Why bird-watching is still popular with aeronautical engineers
“A Blackbird jet flying nearly 2,000 miles per hour covers 32 body lengths per second. But a common pigeon flying at 50 miles per hour covers 75.
The roll rate of the aerobatic A-4 Skyhawk plane is about 720 degrees per second. The roll rate of a barn swallow exceeds 5,000 degrees per second.
Select military aircraft can withstand gravitational forces of 8-10 G. Many birds routinely experience positive G-forces greater than 10 G and up to 14 G.”
From a report on research at the University of Michigan.