I Am Very Tall

Via Silicon Alley Insider, with italics added:

Erica Watson-Currie of Newport Beach, Calif., a consultant and lecturer, is among the women up in arms that the iPhone won't respond to their long fingernails. She states, "Considering ergonomics and user studies indicating men and women use their fingers and nails differently, why does Apple persist in this misogyny?"

Watson-Currie pegs her average fingernail length for those curious between an eighth and a quarter of an inch. She yearns for a stylus to save her from her iPhone woes. Unfortunately many have praised the iPhone for not using a stylus, which many feel is a burden and easy to lose.

Also pissed off - fat people with fat fingers. Bummer.

Fred Wilson's take on why to use Disqus (the commenting system that I happen to be using):

1) Threaded discussions - When you want to leave a comment that is actually a reply to someone else's comment, you click on the reply link and the comment/reply is indented right under the original comment. On any comment thread/discussion with a lot of action, this is absolutely necessary to make sense of the discussion. I am shocked that a popular blog like Techcrunch doesn't have this feature in its comments. Certainly it's possible for commenters to use an @sign to signify a comment that is actually a reply, but threaded discussion is so much better.

2a) Email Replies - Disqus emails every comment to the blogger. If the blogger wants to reply to the comment, he/she simply replies to the email and it is posted as a reply (with the indent described above). This feature, which I requested the day I met/saw Disqus for the first time, is the single best thing about Disqus and has transformed my blog comments because I can now participate in them in real time throughout the day as the conversation develops. This is a BIG DEAL.

2b) Email Replies for Commenters - It works the same way for commenters. If you leave a comment in Disqus and have given Disqus your email address, you will get an email when anyone replies to your comment. You can reply to that just like the blogger can. This is also a big deal and leads to much more active commenting and replying - ie discussion.

3) Shared profiles. As more and more blogs add Disqus (over 10,000 at this point), the profiles that commenters create in Disqus are shared across blogs. This is an important network effect that benefits the blogger and his/her community. For example, if you have a blog that is read by a similar audience as my blog, and you add Disqus to your blog, most of my commenters will already be recognized by Disqus the first time they show up in your comments. They don't need to set up a new profile. They''ll have the same avatar/icon and identity.

Also, there's a greasemonkey script that brings disqus comments and commenting right into Google Reader. You can get it here.

I really only have about 10 regular readers on this blog, so the marginal benefit of installing Disqus has been pretty weak. But, if I did have a real audience, I bet it sure would be neat.

So, I typed out the last two posts on Pudge's Macbook Air, which she bought because HBS requires her to have a 'high-powered' laptop. I will be the first to admit that the Air is a sexy, sexy beast. The keyboard, form factor, etc. is all great. However, switching from a PC to a Mac is proving to be a much larger pain in the ass then expected.

The biggest problem is that I'm a huge user of keyboard shortcuts and it's taking me a ridiculous amount of time to get used to the differences. Here's what's tripping me up.

* Lack of dedicated page up/page down buttons. Apparently, this is solely Air related.
* I have no idea how to page through tabs in Firefox
* I have no idea how to rapidly switch back and forth between windows
* Ctrl functions seem to be split across the option and command buttons
* I have no idea how to replicate Alt like functions

I'm picking things up through a slow, slow process of trial and error. I realize that I could probably go look it up online, but I figure this isn't my machine and I don't really want to get too used to it.

Steve Jobs recently upset a lot of people by saying that nobody reads books anymore, and hence the development of eReaders is irrelevant. Here's his quote, taken from the NYT:

It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.

A lot of people have attacked that statement. But it looks like eReaders may have other issues to deal with. From ArsTechnica:

Survey data shows books have the highest "attachment" rating of any leisure media activity. People are more attached to their books than they are to their satellite television, radio stations, newspapers, magazines, social networks, video games, blogs, DVDs, and P2P file-swapping. And it's not like this high rate of affection for the book occurs only among a small group; books came in second only to "listen to the radio" in terms of the number of people who engage in those activities.

... When the survey asked about people's emotional attachment to paper books, 53 percent of respondents said that they would "never" or would "hate" to stop using them, and another 24 percent said they would be "uncomfortable."

When asked directly about the appeal of e-book readers, 39 percent of the respondents said that the readers were appealing or very appealing, but 61 percent had the opposite reaction.

Here's the silver lining:

The survey notes that familiarity with the devices seems to boost their attractiveness to most people, and 17 percent of respondents did say they would almost certainly purchase a reader once they learned about all of its features and benefits.

Even so, that's not a very high number. I have to wonder if that statistic would get a boost if Apple announced that it was making a super stylish eReading device oriented at hipsters and their teenaged emulators.

I've been looking into some of the third-party uses of last.fm data. Some of the stuff is pretty cool. For instance, there are two online tools measuring diversity of taste. By both metrics, I'm not super-boring, but I'm not pushing any envelopes either. Here's a quick synopsis:

Range of musical artists:
I thought this was pretty cool. The actual test comes in two flavors, the standard eclectic and the super eclectic. This test looks at the first 5 (or 20) artists associated with artists in your Top 20 (or Top 50). The diversity of your tastes is then calculated as a percentage of the possible maximum (100 or 1000). I came up with a score of 468/1000. You can see how that stacks up to everyone else on last.fm in the following chart.

As I said, not impressive, but not shabby either.

AEP (Anti-Exponential Points):
This metric essentially looks at the number of plays your most favored artist gets vs. the number of plays of your 50th most favored artist. The underlying math looks a little stupid to me, but it does look at something that the previous metric avoids, namely the degree of concentration in the top tier. Anyway, I submitted myself to the test and got a 3.69/5, which again means I'm not super diverse, but I don't suck either. Unfortunately, these guys didn't put together a neat little histogram of their distributions.

There is, however, a group of high-scoring and low-scoring people. Both of them (and particularly the high-scoring set) seem to do nothing but listen to Radiohead all the time.

Some of you that actually visit the blog directly may have noticed the last.fm widget on the side. As of today, that widget is outdated. I signed up for last.fm in 2005 and was impressed by the core concept. I'm all about getting an external view on who I am and what I do, and last.fm was exactly that with regards to music. It's also pretty cool to see who your musical peers are and what they're listening to.

I stopped using last.fm for a while, because the service was still pretty clunky and the Scrobbler (where do they get these words?) would crash my computer pretty routinely. Besides, last.fm couldn't keep track of anything that I listened to off of the computer, which at that point was about 60% of my musical consumption. So, I let iTunes keep track of all my musical doings.

Today, I imported all of my iTunes history back into last.fm and am now using it to manage everything. I had to ditch my old last.fm profile, but in return, I get to see about 25x more data. Looking at the evidence, I'm struck by a few things about myself.

1. My listening habits are highly concentrated in a core set of artists. I wish I could pop the data into Excel so I could draw up the concentration chart.
2. I'm a lot less musically adventurous than I thought I was. Back in the day, I would have said that I'm pretty balanced across genres. The data doesn't lie - I'm a dyed-in-the-wool mainstream rock fan with indie leanings. Hip hop and electro are just blips on the radar of my listening habits.
3. I'm a lot less passionate about the music that I'm listening to today. My profile is almost entirely based on what I listened to about a year ago. Since then, I've barely listened to anything in my Top 20 artists/albums. Of the albums that I'm listening to now, they barely register in my overall charts.

If I ever have a kid, I'm going to have him scrobble pretty much everything he/she listens to. I think it would be so cool to have the entire history of your musical consumption ready for review. In case anyone's interested in seeing my tastes, ranging from roughly January 2006 to the present, take a look here.

I got bored last night and set up a new tumblelog, iamverytall.tumblr.com. For those of you that don't know what a tumblog is, the line that they give is:

"If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks."

After actually looking at how tumblelogs (that's a really long name, now that I have to keep typing it) work, I have to admit that I don't really get it. The chief differentiator between a tlog (ah, much shorter) and a blog is that it's a lot easier to add media posts to tlogs than it is to blogs, e.g. you don't have to find an alternate site to host that mp3 that you want to put up, you can e-mail photos from your phone, etc. But that's additional functionality, and it doesn't preclude me from using tumblr in the exact same way that I use Blogger. Maybe I'm missing something, but it's hard to see why a blog is any more text-friendly than the tlog, save for the most superficial of reasons. Bottom line, there's no obvious reason that the tblog can't be both a journal and a scrapbook, and if I'm going to manage an online presence, I'd rather do it where I have more options, not less.

Of course, I could be missing something. So I'll play along with it for now, and will probably use it to post music, pictures, etc.

From Ars Technica:

Effective immediately, Toshiba will ramp down shipments of HD DVD players with an eye towards stopping them altogether by the end of March. The company left open the possibility of continuing to ship laptops with HD DVD drives installed, but it's difficult to believe that there would be any demand for them

Glad I'm no longer one of those early adopter types.

In some non-campaign related news, I thought I'd post some thoughts on Wikinvest, a site that was started by a relation of mine. The concept is to harness the collective power of the masses and apply it to the world of investment, providing an alternative to traditional investment sites such as Yahoo! Finance, Google Finance, Motley fool, TheStreet.com, and so on. Although the site's content is supposed to be thesis driven (they have pages for bulls and bears), its current manifestation is more akin to an encyclopedia focused on companies, their business models, and macro trends currently affecting the markets. More thorough write-ups about the company can be found here, here, and here.

Just some quick commentary on the site, from my perspective.

Things they're getting right:
I think they're doing a pretty good job along a couple of fronts. First, I think the reputation system is pretty good (i.e. better than I've seen at other Wiki's), and could function as a modest incentive to get people to add what they know. Will it stop people from trying to game the system? I'm less confident about that. But still, given that the name of the game is to build critical mass, providing some incentives is far better than providing none.

Second, I think their seed content is a good step in the right direction. To be honest, if the content wasn't as good as it is, I think the site would be DOA. Again, it's a good step, but it still feels incomplete. I think they need to keep building on the seed until they have enough of an audience that it will start building itself.

Third, I haven't seen it yet, but the data tables that they're going to roll out sound like they'll be good. It's an open question as to whether they'll actually work, but if they do, that would be a strong development.

Things to work on:
The chief aim, for now and forever, is to build an audience. Moreover, that needs to be a recurring audience, as opposed to a spiky, one-time audience (e.g. the kind of audience Elfyourself had). Ideally, that audience should be engaged enough that they'll start contributing and take the content-development burden off of the site's editors.

I think the last point should be the key focus. Right now, I think there's enough reasonable content that they might be able to attract users for a bit. But without a focal point of engagement, they won't come back, nor will they contribute. Their current initiative - adding data tables - will make the site more useful to casual visitors, but it strikes me as being yet another piece that they'll have to seed and update until they build critical mass.

Here are some thoughts:
* They should do everything they can to turn their list of contributors into a community. I'd imagine that they should at least have a news feed and forums/discussion boards, rather than their current freeform discussion pages
* They should emulate Wikipedia and funnel visitor contributions towards certain key pages, so as to facilitate more visible development
* They should build on their current reputation system and begin rewarding high-performing contributors in some way
* Structuring an entire post is likely to be too big for a casual visitor. Somehow streamlining this process, or maybe creating a standard template, would make this process go a lot more smoothly

Yet another feature from Google, Google Maps now has a "Street View" function that allows you to see what a spot on the map looks like at street level. As a New Yorker, I've got to say that this is one of the most awesome features ever. No more having to go to a random street corner and then searching for a few minutes to find a place - now you can just look at it from the street level and see where it is ahead of time.

The number of photographs that they must have taken in order to construct this feature blows my mind. Some locations are more fully fleshed out than others (my hometown of Atherton only has photos on El Camino vs. the ENTIRE NYC GRID), so if you're in the middle of Podunk, this may not be such a big deal for you. But anyone who lives in a city and has ever spent time searching a street corner will immediately see the value here.

...

Ok, so really, this isn't that big of a deal. It's still really cool though.

Fred Wilson recently posted this about the future of e-mail. His comment is a very VC-like pronouncement about the end of some era or other. His pronouncement is about the death of e-mail, or at least, its reduced usage in the coming era. The essence of his post is captured in this statement:

"Eventually every technology is trumped by something new and better. And I feel that email is ready to be trumped. But by what?"

Seeing as how I'm a big fan boy of his, I decided to post my first response ever. In the midst of posting that response, I figured that I should probably put the response down on my own blog and kill two birds with one stone. Here it is:

I think you're partially right. In the future, we will probably communicate via a collection of technologies. But I'm pretty sure that e-mail will be one of them, along with traditional phone calls, text messaging, and all that jazz.

I think that what's going to happen is a continuation of a current trend - different services will increasingly be used for highly specialized forms of communication that fit different needs. To clarify, these services have been dividing themselves up along a few axes - voice vs. text, one-way (sort of) vs. two-way, message length, assumed timeliness of response, number of recipients, etc. As user adoption increases, we'll start using the different services as tools that can be used interchangeably, depending on our current communicative needs.

This is already happening now. For example, text messages are a two-way channel with limited message length and assume a high level of responsiveness (although not quite as high as an actual phone call). Twitter is similar, but it's a one-way channel, assumes virtually no response at all, and can be blasted to a huge number of recipients. They each serve very different needs - you wouldn't try to remind your wife to pick up the kids via Twitter anymore than you would want to use text messaging to tell *all* of your friends that you're hanging out at Central Park.

The "axes" could certainly be refined, and will almost certainly change with technological development (e.g. blackberries have changed everyone's assumptions about a person's accessibility via e-mail). There's probably an unspoken social etiquette component out there that needs to be addressed. All the same, I think this is a valuable way of thinking about the evolving landscape of communications.

That being said, I think that e-mail is going to evolve - it's not going to go away. It is a perfect fit for a set of communicative needs and will thus have to stay in the game. The current problem that it's facing is a volume problem, and all of the other two-way communication mediums will eventually run into that same problem as they gain acceptance. This is a surface problem, and is not a fundamental defect of e-mail as a form. If anything, it just calls for more advanced filtering services (much like Caller ID or a good receptionist).

My guess is that social networks will serve as one of multiple filtration layers that go on top of e-mail and other services, rather than functioning as an entirely separate channel in and of itself. I'd also be surprised if someone didn't start gathering data on the types of messages that the user reads most frequently (a la Google Reader's trends) and then put together a predictive "flagging" feature that would tell the user that they should probably read certain messages first.
But I certainly don't see e-mail going away, anymore than I think that phone calls will go away. It serves too great of a purpose.

A four-day old article in TechCrunch talks about the digital divide in America in light of a recent survey of Internet behavior from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The results of the survey look like this (as usual the formatting of this blog is too narrow, so you'll probably have to click through to actually see what's going on here. I'll get around to widening the format sometime.)
Arrington wonders:

"Is the switch off factor strictly a question of Age? The study found that the Top 8% are young, ethnically diverse, and mostly male (70%). The median age of the Top 8% is 28 with more than half of them under the age of 30. The bottom 15% was not surprisingly older, with a median age of 64 – and as a group reported the lowest levels of household income. And yet this group isn’t entirely switched off: 82% watch TV everyday and 76% have cable or satellite service, and collectively had the highest levels of watching TV or listening to radio of any group in the study; it’s just that there not using Web 2.0."

I think Arrington is partially right - age certainly has something to do with it, but this is most likely a generational issue. The younger generations that grew up with technology are just more comfortable with it and certainly won't start becoming more crotchety about it as they grow older.

I think the surprising statistic is that 70% of the top users are male. You would imagine that in an age where women are outperforming men in higher education, they would be doing equally well in their utilization of technology, or at least their ability to understand how to use it. If that's true, then why are the top users predominantly male?

It's possible that there's a Larry Summer's like answer here - that men are naturally more gifted with technology, etc. But I think that the answer is probably a bit more subtle. My guess is that it's simply another generational issue. Given that the median top user age is about 28, that means that most of these people grew up when computer usage was still equated with pocket protectors, command line prompts, thick-rimmed glasses (before Rivers Cuomo made them into a hipster fashion statement), and a heavy dose of asocial behavior. Computer usage was not equated with self-expression, finding friends, music/movies, and all of this other jazz that Web 2.0 entrepeneurs and Apple are trying to push. At the time, there was probably a social stigma against girls/women using computers and I'm guessing this has had a pretty heavy impact on the number of technologically inclined women. Of the ones that are out there now, I'm guessing that they just happen to be smart enough to have gotten it anyway, without needing to be brought up with it.

Now, in a time when you can't be New York hipster cool if you don't have your own MacBook, website, and MySpace/facebook profile, I'm guessing this gender bias will fade away. It will be interesting to see how the technological profiles of the next generation shape up and its affect on the next wave of technology.

I recently stumbled upon David Sifry, founder of Technorati's post on the State of the Blogosphere. The short of it is that the number of blogs are growing briskly, with the number of blogs doubling every 236 days, although the rate of growth is cooling down a bit. There are now around 57+mm blogs out there, with ~55% of them being active.

The post is pretty interesting, although it's not clear to me if Technorati is getting this data from the major services or just from people that subscribe to Technorati's service. If it's the latter, then I would say that this data is only reflective of a specific subsegment of the blogosphere. Moving on.

One thing that caught my eye was that the average # of posts/day is growing a lot more slowly than the # of blogs (roughly 3x since late '04 vs. 10x since late '04). My guess is that blogging - like the SAT's - is increasingly being done by the mainstream, with a higher number of people writing on a semi-frequent basis. So if you think my blog is mediocre and poorly updated, just wait until the rest of the world really gets on the bandwagon.

Couple other quick points:

1. The NYTimes is getting about 3.5x more trackbacks (I think that's what inbound sources is referring to) than Fox News. Much like the Dems winning the elections, that makes me happy.

2. The Japanese are almost as blog-crazy as the English (33% vs. 39% of posts). I am really, really curious about what they write about.

Anyway, that's all for now.