March 2011 – rc3.org

Month: March 2011 (page 1 of 3)

The etymology of +1

When Google announced their new +1 feature, which enables end users to recommend things, I was mainly struck by the incredible geekiness of it. Everybody understands “Like,” whereas +1 was taken from the Apache open source community and its history probably isn’t known to even 5% of Google’s users. Kellan at Laughing Meme digs into the history and finds what is, perhaps, the first mention of +1 style voting. I love it.

How thought experiments go wrong

March 29, 2011 / Rafe / 5 Comments

O’Reilly Radar republishes a blog post imagining what Steve Jobs would do if he were President of the United States and needless to say, the writer supposes that Steve Jobs would do lots of cool stuff. What the article really shows is that the writer has no clue how the government actually works. Our government is structured in such a way that it’s incredibly difficult to get a lot done, regardless of who you are, and the sort of silly thinking that this article espouses only makes the problem worse. What the country needs is structural change that makes it possible for our leaders to be more effective, not magical thinking about the persuasive powers of great leaders.

Thinking about what should happen is easy — the hard part is figuring out the mechanisms by which it can happen, whether it’s political reform at the national level or setting up a continuous integration platform for your software development project. After seeing the excitement and hope of the Obama campaign transition into two years of excruciating political trench warfare, I just don’t have any interest in hand waving and big, silly ideas.

The federal government is full of smart, competent, persuasive people working in a system that prevents them from rapidly addressing even the problems with obvious solutions. Let’s see some realistic thought experiments that address that.

RIP, Paul Baran

March 28, 2011 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Paul Baran, one of the original inventors of the Internet, passed away this weekend at age 84. He’s credited with inventing the packet-switched network. Here’s how he described his contribution to the creation of the Internet:

The process of technological developments is like building a cathedral. Over the course of several hundred years, new people come along and each lays down a block on top of the old foundations, each saying, ‘I built a cathedral.’ Next month another block is placed atop the previous one. Then comes along an historian who asks, ‘Well, who built the cathedral?’ Peter added some stones here, and Paul added a few more. If you are not careful you can con yourself into believing that you did the most important part. But the reality is that each contribution has to follow onto previous work. Everything is tied to everything else.

Sometimes it’s strange to me to think that we’re watching the twilight of the first generation of computer scientists. What a world they created for us to enjoy.

Chris Dixon on tech bubbles

March 27, 2011 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Chris Dixon has this to say about whether we’re in the midst of another tech bubble:

I think it’s a good thing that the speculation on large private tech companies is happening in secondary markets where the risks are being taken by institutions or wealthy individuals. This is in stark contrast to the dot-com bubble of the 90s where many of the people holding the bag when bubble popped were non-rich people who bought stocks through public markets. Obviously this could change if we have a bunch of tech IPOs.

This is a wise point. If investors want to plow $41 million dollars into some kind of Instagram/Flickr/Foursquare/Groupon mashup that nobody understands, what do I care?

The privilege of the majority

March 25, 2011 / Rafe / 0 Comments

This is from a response to a gamer’s complaints about non-straight characters in the game Dragon’s Age 2, from one of the game’s writers, David Gaider:

… the truth is that privilege always lies with the majority. They’re so used to being catered to that they see the lack of catering as an imbalance. They don’t see anything wrong with having things set up to suit them, what’s everyone’s fuss all about? That’s the way it should be, and everyone else should be used to not getting what they want.

He could just as easily be explaining why people watch Fox News.

Scott Sumner illustrates why it’s easy to hate libertarians

March 23, 2011 / Rafe / 16 Comments

Libertarian economist Scott Sumner talks about the “marshmallow test” and says that he doesn’t trust Democrats:

What do we do if Social Security needs to be trimmed in order to balance the budget? I hear lots of talk about cutting back on benefits for those who “don’t need it.” That would be people like me. Here’s why I don’t trust the Dems—I see them as the party of one marshmallow eaters. They represent people who have less self-control. I fear they will cut my benefits, but not cut the benefits of people who didn’t save for retirement. I fear they will use “wealth” as the criterion to determine who is needy and who isn’t; not lifetime wage earnings.

In my view there is nothing egalitarian about redistributing income from two marshmallow eaters to one marshmallow eaters. They’ve already had their fun when young, loading up their three car garages with all sorts of fun toys. I’ve never even had a garage.

My take on this is that Scott Sumner is a selfish bastard who’s painfully out of touch. There are plenty of people in America and around the world who were never offered the first marshmallow. The Democrats don’t do much to help them out, but Republicans and libertarians don’t seem to believe the government should help them at all. In fact, their main concern is that people with many, many marshmallows can eat them all themselves, and they justify that stance the same way Scott Sumner does. If you’re poor, it’s because you’re inferior to people like them.

The perfect job ad

March 23, 2011 / Rafe / 2 Comments

The perfect job description serves two purposes. It attracts the kind of people you would hope to hire, and almost as importantly, it discourages the sorts of people you don’t want to hire. Going through big piles of resumes is not fun. Job ads that extoll the virtues of your workplace without laying out any of the potential drawbacks may attract lots of resumes, but it’s almost certain that 90% of them will be from people you don’t want to screen, much less hire.

This ad for an investigative reporter from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune is a masterpiece of the form. Some number of people are going to be incredibly enthused by the ad, but a lot of people would read it and know instantly that they are not interested in or cut out for the job. I guarantee it saves them a lot of time.

I remember once interviewing someone about whom I had real doubts. I wasn’t sure what questions to ask to confirm my suspicions, so instead I just tried to scare them away by telling them that it was a small company and that people who couldn’t do the job would be exposed. Anyway, I was outvoted, the person was hired, and they didn’t last six months. Maybe we should have written a more honest job description.

Where is the Amazon Prime of online journalism?

March 21, 2011 / Rafe / 11 Comments

A lot of people have said that they wished that the New York Times’ new pricing system was more about offering more value for people who do pay rather than putting barriers in the way of people who don’t pay. Those remarks immediately made me think of Amazon Prime.

Amazon Prime subscribers pay $80 a year in exchange for “free” two day shipping on every Prime-eligible item they purchase from Amazon.com. It is, essentially, a loyalty program that you have to pay to join. I’m certain it exerts a powerful influence on the buying habits of subscribers. If a subscriber buys something from a site other than Amazon.com, they’re likely to pay more for shipping, receive the item later, or both. Plus, they’ve already got the sunk cost of the Prime membership on their mind. When they go to other sites, they probably think, “Shouldn’t I look for this on Amazon.com first to see if I can use my Prime membership?”

I always wonder how many Amazon Prime subscribers buy enough stuff over the course of the year to make the $80 they spend on their Prime membership a good deal. My guess is what they’re really buying is the ability to make impulse purchases without worrying about whether they should have waited to group items for free shipping, which in turn leads them to spend even more money with Amazon.com. Amazon.com further benefits from Prime because it encourages third party sellers who use the site to turn their fulfillment operation over to them as well so that their merchandise can be eligible for Prime shipping.

One of the core values at O’Reilly is to create more value than you capture. The fact that Prime benefits Amazon.com in many ways has nothing to do with why people pay for it — they pay for it because it delivers value to them. What can the New York Times offer that creates more value than it captures?

Clearly the New York Times would argue that their articles and blog posts deliver value well beyond their subscription fee. Unfortunately, they have lowered the perceived value of their product by providing free access to their articles for years, and more importantly, close substitutes for what the New York Times offers remain freely available.

Anyway, my plan was to make this a really awesome post with a suggestion for the New York Times that would save the paper and revolutionize online journalism. Unfortunately, great ideas elude me. I even sat and thought about what service I would gladly pay for from the New York Times, and I couldn’t come up with anything. Maybe I’m just happy I don’t work for a news site.

Publishing a resilient blog

March 18, 2011 / Rafe / 10 Comments

Brent Simmons wants to see people move back to Web logs that render posts to static files so that they don’t go down in flames every time they get an unexpected traffic spike. I just wanted to point out that it is possible to build a resilient Web site using WordPress, as I explained in my post How to Speed Up WordPress In an Emergency.

I’ve never put a lot of faith in content management systems that “bake” pages if those pages will be updated dynamically. Obviously the worst case for any site is cratering under load, but the second worst is not showing people the most up to date content that’s available. If you allow comments on your site or provide other dynamic features, caching can be pretty tricky, and simply baking pages is almost completely impossible.

Fortunately, there are other ways to go about things. I still prefer caching at the database level to caching at the page level, but there’s no reason that a site that’s really dealing with a lot of traffic can’t do both.

The New York Times tries to thread the needle

March 17, 2011 / Rafe / 9 Comments

The New York Times is about to embark on its latest experiment in getting online readers to pay up. They posted the details today. If you visit the Web site, you’ll be placed under the following constraint:

On NYTimes.com, you can view 20 articles each month at no charge (including slide shows, videos and other features). After 20 articles, we will ask you to become a digital subscriber, with full access to our site.

They are allowing readers who are referred to the site from blogs to read those articles:

Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit. For some search engines, users will have a daily limit of free links to Times articles.

I may or may not pay for the site, but I’m glad they’re going to take some steps to make sure that their relevance doesn’t fall too far in terms of being a site referenced on blogs. I generally don’t subscribe to sites behind paywalls because even if I enjoy them, I can’t link to them from the blog.

It’ll be interesting to see whether the New York Times can thread the needle of earning subscription revenue without losing in the market for attention. Most other sites that have tried it have not done well.

Update: Felix Salmon has some thoughts on the New York Times’ pricing model. I noticed this oddity as well:

Beyond that, $15 per four-week period gives you access to the website and also its smartphone app, while $20 gives you access to the website also its iPad app. But if you want to read the NYT on both your smartphone and your iPad, you’ll need to buy both digital subscriptions separately, and pay an eye-popping $35 every four weeks. That’s $455 a year.

The message being sent here is weird: that access to the website is worth nothing. Mathematically, if A+B=$15, A+C=$20, and A+B+C=$35, then A=$0.

Update: Cory Doctorow’s comments are worth reading as well.

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