Thomas Van Der Wal compares LinkedIn and Facebook (with a bit of Twitter thrown in). Here’s the upshot:

Michael Arrington writes about Facebook has LinkedIn in their Crosshairs, but I have been finding Facebook becoming increasingly less valuable the more people I have connected in it. The converse is opposite for me, LinkedIn becomes incredibly more valuable the more people I have in it. The reason for my derived value is simplicity.

The whole post is really good.

The day the Nobel Prize for Economics is announced is one of my favorite days to read blogs. You have to assume that everyone who becomes an academic in the field of economics at least ponders the idea of someday being a Nobel Prize winner, and so the day the Nobel Prize is announced is a big day for economists and for economics blogs. Every year when the prizes is announced, economics blogs are abuzz.

Marginal Revolution already has several lengthy posts on the prize, explaining the economic theories that earned the award to non-economists, and profiling the winners. Very impressive considering that the award was just announced earlier today, and October 6, the winners were not even on Tyler Cowen’s short list of potential winners. (The winners weren’t on Greg Mankiw’s list, either.)

I really enjoy how excited economists get when it comes to the award, and the excellent coverage of the award that they provide. It makes me wish we had a Nobel Prize for software development. (My favorite bit of trivia about the prize is that unlike the other Nobel Prizes it was not established in Alfred Nobel’s will — it was created in 1968 by the Bank of Sweden.)

Scott Rosenberg writes about the new evidence-based scheduling feature in FogBugz 6.0. FogBugz has long supported enabling developers to enter estimates for how long it will take to resolve issues, and to enter the time spent resolving them as well. The problem was that once you did that, there were no really easy ways to mine that data and make inferences based on that information. The other problem is that it’s difficult to get developers to enter estimates for bugs and even more difficult to get them to enter the elapsed time. (Most developers I know don’t even keep track of their time on a per-issue basis.)

The only way to get developers to enter estimates is to demand that they do it. FogBugz 6.0 makes it a bit easier to keep track of elapsed time, though, by including a time tracking feature. We’re rolling out FogBugz 6.0 at work, and I’m finding that I actually like the time tracking. For one thing, it’s a tool for focus. When you kick off the timer on a task, you don’t want to jump around and multitask because it will just throw off the timer. The timer feature itself is pretty easy to use. We’ll see if I can stick with the habit of using it, but I am going to make a concerted effort toward doing so.

I’m finding more and more that accurate estimation is a key part of the job of software development, and it’s hard to get better if you don’t track your performance over time. Building things faster is obviously an important goal for any software developer, but being able to guess how long tasks will take before you start them is nearly as important.

I’ll report on how it goes with FogBugz 6.0 as I use it more.

What is it with conservatives and the anger, lately? On a serious note, we find conservatives putting a concerted effort into debunking the life story of a 12 year old who claims to have benefited from a government health insurance program. Conservative bloggers have adopted the tactics used to attack John Kerry’s military service and applied them to a kid and his family who support a position that they dislike. Today the LA Times reports on conservative anger over which dates are commemorated by alterations to the Google logo. It seems like there should be more to existence than just looking for excuses to let hatred well up in your gut. (Yes, the title of this post is an Orwell reference.)

Ian Rogers, the general manager of Yahoo! Music lays it out in simple terms for the music industry:

But now, eight years later, Amazon’s finally done what was clearly the right solution in 1999. Music in the format that people actually want it in, with a Web-based experience that’s simple and works with any device. I bought tracks from Amazon (Kevin Drew and No Age), downloaded them, sync’d them to my new iPod Nano, and had them playing in my home audio system (Control 4) in less than five minutes. PRAISE JESUS. It only took 8 years.

8 years. How much opportunity have we lost in those 8 years? How much naivety and hubris did we have when we said, “if we build it they will come”? What did we spend? And what did we gain? We certainly didn’t gain mass user adoption or trust, two prerequisites to success on the Internet.

Inconvenient experiences don’t have Web-scale potential, and platforms which monetize the gigantic scale of the Web is the only way to compete with the control you’ve lost, the only way to reclaim value in the music industry. If your consultants are telling you anything else, they are wrong.

He also refers to iTunes as “a spreadsheet that plays music,” which is both funny and true.

Tonight I was listening to Terry Gross interview Stephen Colbert, and I was fascinated to hear his reaction to the idea that his show might influence the political discourse. (You can listen to the interview here.) He rejects the idea that his show or satirists in general play any role whatsoever in shaping the political discourse in this country. More importantly, he obviously hates the idea that his show could play any role in the political discourse.

In some ways, his comments remind me of what it’s like to publish a blog. When you don’t believe you wield any influence, you can say whatever you want. I am still consistently shocked whenever I write something here and I get a response from someone who can actually do something about it. (It happens occasionally when write about software and Web sites, never when I write about politics.) Insignificance makes it a lot easier to be candid. (It also makes it easier to be a jerk, but I try to avoid that.)

I thought it was interesting to hear Colbert react in much the same way that I would to the idea of being influential — it’s easier to reject out of hand than really think about the implications. In the larger sense, of course, he actually is influential and I, outside a small circle of people, am not, but that’s beside the point.

Jeff Atwood posts on YouTube’s copyright hypocrisy and how the fair use rules for copyright work. He points out that the copyrighted video clips posted to YouTube generally do not pass muster for fair use, and that YouTube is essentially flouting the law with the silent assent of many copyright holders.

Last October I posted about the benefits of YouTube, which sadly do seem to rest upon a foundation of widespread copyright infringement. If anything I think that YouTube is the best demonstration yet of the absurdity of copyright laws, especially with regard to sports broadcasts. In theory, people are not allowed to post video of events that were witnessed in person by tens of thousands of people and on television by millions of people, but that strikes me as patently absurd.

It’s worth noting that half of the videos I pointed to in my post last year have been removed from YouTube for copyright violations. Different versions of each of them have been uploaded since then by other people. It seems like YouTube, its users, and many copyright holders are willing to let things continue as they are, but you’d think that a real structural change is in order.

The New York Times has a big article on state lotteries today, and the verdict isn’t good. North Carolina, as the state which has most recently started its own lottery, is featured prominently, and the results are not good. The end result is exactly what any economist would predict:

In reality, most of the money raised by lotteries is used simply to sustain the games themselves, including marketing, prizes and vendor commissions. And as lotteries compete for a small number of core players and try to persuade occasional customers to play more, nearly every state has increased, or is considering increasing, the size of its prizes — further shrinking the percentage of each dollar going to education and other programs.

Unsurprisingly, there’s already a name for this phenomenon: rent exhaustion.

Bottom line: lotteries don’t achieve much in terms of funding schools, are a regressive form of taxation, mislead voters into thinking that schools are mostly funded by lotteries and that taxes and bond issues to fund schools aren’t needed, and contribute to gambling addiction. Who ever thought they were a good idea in the first place?

Microsoft has announced that Internet Explorer 7 will no longer be restricted to only those installations of Windows XP that pass Windows Genuine Advantage validation. I’m glad to see Microsoft make the right decision here. IE7 is, among other things, much more secure than IE6. Forcing millions of computers to languish with insecure browsers punished all Internet users by making it easier for those computers to be hijacked and used to distribute viruses, send spam, or otherwise make life miserable for all of us.

I couldn’t publish anything yesterday because upgrading Apache (to deal with some security issue) blew up suexec and I couldn’t get it to work again. suexec is an Apache module that you can use to tell the Web server to run its CGI scripts as a user other than the user who owns the Apache process. The idea is that if I own some files on the server but I want to let Apache write to them, rather than using file permissions, I can just configure suexec to run CGI scripts as me, so that then they can write to my files.

Unfortunately, this approach is rife with potential security problems. If suexec were not extremely picky, it would provide a very simple means for people to compromise servers. The bottom line is that for suexec to actually work, about 12 things have to be set up correctly, and about 6 of those things have to be baked into Apache at compile time. I got it to work once, but I wasn’t as lucky the second time.

After wrangling with it off and on for a day, I gave up and just assigned the files in my document root to the www group and then allowed group write access to them. I’m the only user on this server anyway.