I want my life to end. I am tired of f@#$ing up everything. I am tired of people always telling me that they do not like me. I am tired of trying to be decent. I hope that someone finds this post and I hope that my parents know that I f@#$ed up not them. It is my fault I screwed up my own life. The hate that rages within me, rages not for those I love so dearly or those who have crossed my path. This hate rages full force towards me and only me.

I have long forgiven those who've hurt me, but I have not and cannot come to terms to forgive myself for the things I have done to myself, and the things I've done to hurt those in my life.

Should you Give One, Get One in order to get an XO to use as a netbook for serious adult-type productivity? I wouldn’t: The child-sized, rubbery keyboard wasn’t meant for grown-up touch typists. And while OLPC has introduced an XO that runs Windows XP, the G1G1 laptops are the original ones, running Linux and the decidedly kid-oriented “Sugar” user interface.

There's one big improvement this year. OLPC has arranged for Amazon to handle fulfillment.

Last year, the fulfillment firm chosen by OLPC proved incapable of getting laptops out to donors in an organized and timely fashion: When I made a donation I didn’t to the fact that I had to wait for weeks after the estimated arrival date had come and gone so much as that the fulfillment house lost my mailing address. Repeatedly.

Well, it's been an interesting 28 months here at Nortel for me. All functions and resources (other than a few corporate activities) will be decentralized and integrated into full business units. The central CTO and R&D functions will be divided and moved into each BU and, as such, my role is no longer needed. I am comfortable with this direction. I was brought into Nortel to help correct many years of neglect on R&D. I believe that has been accomplished. In the new formation, the global CTO role is not necessary.

I am, as many of you know, an optimist.

Teaching children to use Windows is like teaching them to smoke tobacco—in a world where only one company sells tobacco. Like any addictive drug, it inculcates a harmful dependency. No wonder Microsoft offers the first dose to children at a low price. Microsoft aims to teach poor children this dependency so they can smoke Windows for their whole lives. I don’t think governments or schools should support that aim.

(Photo by cheetah100)

CrispyGamer Must Be Running Out of Money

- If you’re not paying attention, it may seem as if the cratering economy ...
- CrispyGamer, a newish videogame site, has raised $8.25 million from J.P. Morgan’s Constellation Ventures.
- But CrispyGamer also says it has a staff of 20 people, including five full-time writers (what does everyone else do there?). That’s an awfully big staff to keep afloat on $2 CPMs–and it’s hard to imagine that CripsyGamers’s backers imagined that’s what they were getting into earlier this year.

So what is Guy's new book about? To be honest, I have no idea. I didn't read it. I didn't even pretend to read it. Guy is craven enough that he doesn't really care whether I read his book or not. As he put it to me, all he wants is a famous name to put on the cover, and pretty much everyone turned him down and so he had to resort to calling me, and so, fine.

So this is it — my official endorsement. Reality Check is by far the best book ever written about the Valley. It's an important and necessary work, one that should be required reading in every business school in the country. I wish this book had been around when I was starting Apple in my garage back in 1976.

There's a really super-important lesson, yet one that so many people overlook, especially here in the Valley. Anyway, if these incredibly super-obvious things aren't already super-obvious to you, then you probably need to read a book like this and have someone like Guy Kawasaki teach you how to start a business in terms that a child could understand.

Namaste, poorly informed wannabe business people. I honor the place where your imbecilic gaze and my incredlibly wise words become one. Much love. Peace out.

Asked at a speech this month whether he would consider entering the political arena, the 53-year-old Mr. Schmidt shouted, "H-, no!" But some tech and media executives speculate that he might desire a role in an Obama administration, possibly the chief technology officer post Sen. Obama has said he would create.

(Photo by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³)

In 2008, I shouldn’t see local businesses still acting as if the web and search are as far away from them as they thought in 1998.

I needed new locks for the house. That sent me to Google to try a search for “locksmith 92663.” The local locksmiths obviously never search like this in a way that their customers might. The results I got back were loaded with “mapspam,” where a single company appears to have registered many fake addresses to crowd out competitors.

I had to struggle through Google’s help pages to eventually find the correct instructions. If I’m a small business owner seeing a fake business, I want a prominent link somewhere that says “Report Fake Business!”

Since Georges Doriot got the ball rolling in 1946, the venture business has remained a straightforward proposition. Invest long-term and earn a return for your limited partners. There have been structural changes, mostly involving VCs edging out of early-stage investment to focus on big bang later-stage deals. But venture investors have generally avoided the financial adventurism common to Wall Streeters.

Except, in one important respect: Many of the limited partners that fattened venture funds are the same pension funds, endowments and other institutions that in recent years levered up, piled into hedge and private equity funds, and otherwise made a big problem even bigger.

In turn, venture capitalists in recent years plowed much of that money into Web 2.0 companies, such as YouTube and Facebook.

From there, the piece just needs a punchy conclusion, which we'll supply: "Now that the economic crunch is affecting online advertising, these investments are no longer seen as can't-lose deals. It's time to pull out!"

It would seem a dangerous gamble for Huffington to intentionally affect the brutality and off-the-wall demands of, say, Anna Wintour. It's not clear that a website like Huffington Post, bookmarked rather than subscribed to, will ever be able to comfortably lock in readers and advertisers like a Vogue, or to offer the same sort of glamor as a perquisite to staff.

Right on, Ryan. Owen and I have, like, 20 years of magazine work between us. If there aren't supermodels or at least Al Gore traipsing through the place daily, you're only going to drop off your boss's dry cleaning so many times.

In many parts of Silicon Valley, it seems misguided to regard the U.S. economy as reliant solely on Wall Street. The future still depends on entrepreneurs and innovations — and green-tech businesses getting “traction.” Most of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’s ventures are long-term investments. And entrepreneurs are still bringing new ideas through the door at a steady pace. “I don’t expect the credit crunch will change that,” said partner John Denniston.

Some of the firm’s fledging green ventures are evolutionary improvements on current technologies that will soon hit the market, like the electric Think car. Others promise to revolutionize various aspects of the energy economy — solar power or biofuels — much as Netscape or Google remade the Web, or Genentech ushered in the biotechnology era.

Kleiner was not the only venture firm that had suddenly seen the future and decided it was green. But Kleiner’s past success tends to legitimize the prospects of business ideas that in many cases have spent decades on the economic fringe.

The most challenging aspect of Kleiner’s endeavor is for green tech to expand into the markets more rapidly than any energy technology has done before. Academics sometimes call this process the diffusion of technology. Diffusion can go very fast, with personal computers or Facebook. But in the field of energy, new technologies have moved quite slowly into the mainstream. It has been 54 years since the silicon solar cell was invented in New Jersey at Bell Laboratories. A front-page article in the Times heralded the breakthrough – in 1954 — as something that promised to revolutionize the world.

John Doerr: “To get solutions at scale, we’re going to have to find answers that are economic for all people everywhere. We’ve got to use policy to harness innovation to make sure that the right thing to do is a profitable thing to do — so it becomes the probable thing to have happen.”

Al Gore believes when the governments of the world assign a price to carbon—within a year or two — demand for carbon-free electricity will explode.

Partner Randy Komisar says the energy market is large and outdated: “I’m not very good at hitting the bull’s-eye. I need a big target. And this is the biggest target I’ve ever seen in my life.”

(Photo by Ausra)

• Apple leaks have shifted from scrappy fan sites into the mainstream. Mac rumors are regularly published by Engadget, owned by AOL. Perhaps Apple is now seeking to avoid legal fisticuffs with more established companies.
• Apple's legal efforts to identify leakers have been entirely fruitless. And as Apple expands its roster of partners—the iPhone will be sold in 70 countries by the end of the year—the number of people possessing information about future products will increase.
• Strong-arming fan sites into removing their reports only serves to confirm those reports. Few were following Think Secret's story about the Mac mini until Apple sued us, propelling the leak into the pages of The New York Times.
• Negative PR ultimately tarnishes Apple's brand when it threatens, subpoenas, and sues sites run by some of its biggest fans.

(Photo by AP/Steven Senne)

Thanks in part to Larry Ellison's hard work and rapacious libido, databases are to be found everywhere. They lie at the bottom of most web applications and in nearly every bit of business software. We're all using databases all the time.

But that's about to change. Chips with two and four processor cores are common and Intel hints that we'll eventually see hundreds of cores per chip, which brings us right back into the 1970s and '80s and the world of parallel computing. That's where databases start to screw up. More than just slow reads and writes, relational databases also create false dependencies between pieces of data. If one chunk of data (A) is dependent on another chunk of data (B), then no work can be done on A until all work on B is complete.

While the database guys are busy figuring out how to add more and more concurrency internally, in reality when you take a few steps back and think of a large set of commodity boxes all executing a single data munching app, then no matter how sophisticated we get, the relational database will still effectively be a single thread to that app.

To scale the Google search service, Google first had to free itself of the false dependencies. So they created MapReduce — a set of operations and a way to store the data for those operations while preserving the natural independence that is inherent in each problem, building the whole mess atop the Google File System.

Google led the way but many other companies have followed suit, opening doors to a wide range of new ways of thinking about large-scale data manipulation. Suddenly there are different ways to store the data, new ways to write applications, and new places (thousands of cheap boxes) to run such applications.

Keep in mind that there is a difference between unlocked and contract-free. Countries where you can buy iPhone 3Gs both unlocked and contract-free include Italy, Belgium, South Africa, Czech Republic, and Greece. But unlike Hong Kong, you can’t buy them directly from Apple in those countries.

The leading theory regarding why Apple is doing this in Hong Kong is that it’s a strategic move in Apple’s ongoing negotiations to officially sell the iPhone in mainland China. Earlier this week came reports that China Mobile is trying to get Apple to sell iPhones without 3G and without Wi-Fi.

So, assuming Apple is not interested in selling crippled Wi-Fi-less iPhones to satisfy China Mobile’s demands, but still wants to profit from the enormous Chinese market, selling unlocked contract-free iPhones in Hong Kong is the optimal way to supply the mainland Chinese gray market.

(Photo by Dan Butterfield)

1. DO appear on Twitter as a real person. Be like comcastcares, not Wachovia.
2. DON'T let your PR firm do the tweeting. A customer-facing employee like comcastcares is best.
3. Who to follow:
   DO follow people who follow your company's account.
   DO follow people who tweet about the company more than once.
   DO follow people who talk about the company's space.
4. DO reply to people who direct-message you. Be engaged and responsive. Be personable. There's nothing worse than sending someone a direct message on Twitter ... and hearing nothing back.

Maybe you are thinking that Twitter, not Google, is the enemy of human intellectual progress. It is hard to think of a technology that wasn’t feared when it was introduced. Socrates feared the impact that writing would have on man’s ability to think. The advent of the printing press summoned similar fears. Professors feared that engineers would use the HP-35, the first hand-held scientific calculator, as a crutch.

For all the new technologies that increase our productivity, there are others that demand more of our time. That is one of the dialectics of our era. With its maps and Internet access, the iPhone saves us time; with its downloadable games, we also carry a game machine in our pocket. But the engineer’s point of view puts trust in human improvement: writing, printing, computing and Googling have only made it easier to think and communicate.

Oh, and we tidied the author's bio: Damon Darlin is not on Twitter.

Problem: You wake up in bed with someone, and you have no recollection of the night before — including his/her name.
Solution: Go with Michael or Elizabeth! According to admissions statistics, those have been the most popular names for the last 2 years

Problem: She goes dry.
Solution: Do not just keep thrusting, didn’t you learn about friction in physics class?

Problem: You left your iTunes on shuffle and Zelda music came on.
Solution: Do not stop kissing, and ask the girl, “how far do you want to go?” “Err, we can go to base 3.14,” is probably how you should respond.

Problem: You haven’t had sex in months or you’ve never had sex.
Solution: Join the club. I haven’t had sex in months.

See, Paul? Bedroom success for MIT students hasn't changed since your own college days!

(Nerd sex illustrated by Randall Munroe/xkcd.com)

People like this are not sick. Most people really never think. Most people just go to work, do the same old thing, and go home. Our programmer can’t *stop* thinking. Our programmer looks at social situations and doesn’t see how they connect to his current stable of pet projects. This guy operates on raw intuition. He never stops thinking about the big picture.

Clean up your rhetoric a little. Acknowledge that the guy has a point. Be up front and clear or you’re nothing but a used car salesman to him. People have to communicate a finite self-contained need. He needs a chance to show off his “super powers."

Handing some micromanager authority over his to-do list is dangerous: there are more dependencies and variables than what anyone else will see or care about, but that are critically important to our programmer/”genius”. In an ideal world, he’d have “June Cleaver” at home to make sure he has dressed himself properly. He’d have an accountant and a secretary. At work, he’d be steered, not “managed”. Once a year, he’d have the chance to work on a two-month project that he prototypes and architects himself where he has the chance to be appreciated as the “genius” that he is.

Kinoma Play seems to totally take over the device's multimedia functions, hiding every trace of Windows Mobile's clunky, antiquated, menu-driven operating system.

It's also a fast search engine for multimedia content on the phone, on the Web or even on your computer via remote search. Kinoma Play works with services including YouTube, Audible, Flickr, iDisk, Live365, Orb and SHOUTcast.

I selected Flickr from Kinoma Play's list of services and signed into my Flickr account in just a few steps. My photos and those of friends were easy to browse.

A section called the Kinoma Guide compiles over 100,000 podcast episodes, radio stations, videos, live television and Webcam clips, panoramas and photos into easy-to-browse categories.

With a touch on the Menu Pod icon, users can add any media to favorites or to an "on-the-go" list. This same tool also sends multimedia to others via email.

I wish it could entirely replace the dated Windows Mobile user interface.

Kinoma is working on Symbian, Linux and even iPhone versions of its application and will release one of those versions by the end of this year.

(Photo by Kimona)

• Letter 1, August 2 From WidgetLaboratory cofounder Spencer Forman to Ning CEO Gina Bianchini: Widgetlaboratory wants to know changes coming to Ning before they happen and to not be blamed when things go wrong.
• Letter 2, August 2 From Bianchini to Forman: Ning and Bianchini want to talk on the phone clear up any "conspiratorial" thinking. "We just want you to succeed in a way that scales. Time and time again it feels like you are trying to threaten us into something that is never exactly clear." Let's work together if we can, if we can't let's move on.
• Letter 3, August 2 From Forman to Bianchini: We have 1,700 networks and millions of users, when we fail you fail. "Considering the fact that we are the only Network that provides any real products to your customers on the Ning "platform," do you really think we are being unreasonable to believe that Ning might keep us notified before you decide to pull the plug on using Dojo [a software toolkit used by JavaScript developers] in the header of every page?"
• Letter 4, August 3 Bianchini to Forman: I'm happy to talk on the phone, but the sniping has to stop.
• Letter 5, August 3 Forman to Bianchini: "Let's get to work."
• Letter 6, August 3 Bianchini to Forman: BTW, you were right we should have let you know about Dojo. Our bad.
• LetterLetter 7, August 7 Bianchini to Forman: Good talking on the phone. No we can't always alert you to when we're about to pull one of your widgets. No you can't ask your users their username, passwords or pins.
• Letter 8, August 7 Forman to Bianchini: No, please call us before you pull our widgets. Even at 3 in the morning. We have a million users! We're not phishers, please let us ask our users for passwords.
• Letter 9, August 7 Bianchini to Forman: Argh, I can't handle this anymore, I'm delegating.
• Letter 10, August 22 Ning general counsel Robert Ghoorah to Forman: You've been removed for TOS violations.
• Letter 11, August 22 Forman to Ghoorah: Our lawyers say: WTF? You can't do this.
• Letter 12, August 22 Ghoorah to Forman: You were booted. "Use of Ning is a privilege not a right. We do not intend to debate our decision."
• Letter 13, August 22 Forman to Ghoorah: Please, therefore, provide "any" specific details as to the "unduly degrading" of your network.
• Letter 14, August 22 Ghoorah to Forman: Your code breaks all the time. We called you last night about it. You were mean and unhelpful.
• Letter 15, August 22 Forman to Ghoorah: It took two minutes to fix the problem when you finally called at 3 a.m. last night.

37signals recommends the Hollywood Launch. Release a few hints until the big day, when people flood your site, sent by blog coverage. What happens: They bring the site down. They discover some big bug. You bring the site down for everyone because there was a syntax error. Everyone misunderstood what your product does because your front page wasn't clear enough. They all think it's stupid. The traffic is gone. Hardly any of those users come back.

What you should have done all along: the Gmail Launch. Have users from day one. Give it to your friends and family. Keep improving it based on their feedback. Let them invite their friends. Automate the process, giving everyone some invite codes to share. Codes protect against a premature slashdotting. Iterate. Take off the code requirement. People will come across it and become real users. Then build buzz. Have some kind of news hook. With Reddit, we switched from Lisp to Python. Start marketing.

(Photo by ioerror)

John McCain will unveil a technology agenda that bundles previously announced pro-business proposals with continued support for a hands-off approach to regulation.

• The plan, dubbed "John McCain and American Innovation," will call for a 10% tax credit on wages paid to all research-and-development employees.
• It will reiterate Sen. McCain's opposition to Internet taxes and new laws guaranteeing net neutrality. Sen. McCain maintains that Congress shouldn't get involved in writing rules for the Internet. Any net-neutrality problems should be left to federal regulators like the FCC.
• Sen. McCain will also call for an expansion of the H1-B visa program.
• The plan will emphasize the importance of providing tax breaks to companies that offer high-speed Internet access in low-income and rural areas.

PR as a profession is broken. Most PR folks don’t read blogs and certainly don’t understand them. All they see is a Google alert with their clients name. For me PR is the last refuge when I’m attacking a story. What do you do if you’re a startup looking for help in getting the word out about your company? First off, don’t hire PR help. Start your own blog. And in your leisure time participate in the fascinating conversations occurring on Twitter and FriendFeed.

Great, except for one thing: Can anyone name a startup founder with leisure time?

(Photo by Jay Meattle)

"Follow spam" is what happens when a Twitter user sets up an automated script to subscribe to thousands of individual users' feeds, found by crawling Twitter's pages. Follow-spammers aren't interested in reading all those people's updates. They're actually hoping their new pretend-friends will follow them back in exchange, creating an opt-in list for their messages. These may be marketing, or just personal drama.

It seems like a victimless crime, but there are two problems caused by comment spam:

• 1. Each user gets a notice whenever a comment spammer starts following them. If you're getting Twitter on your cellphone, it means frequent interruption by annoying "TotalStranger is now following you on Twitter" text messages. If you don't have an unlimited messaging plan, the messages cost you as much as 15 cents each.
• 2. Williams's servers are already overloaded. "In extreme cases," he writes, "these automated accounts have followed so many people they've threatened the performance of the entire system."

That's it. I know, hardly a crisis. White people need something to be uptight about, and Ev Williams has delivered. I give it another three months before there's a service mag called Twitterer at my local Borders.

Ever since the Allies bombed the Axis into submission [See? I told you Adbusters is fun] Western civilization has had a succession of counter-culture movements that have energetically challenged the status quo. Each successive decade of the post-war era has seen it smash social standards, riot and fight to revolutionize every aspect of music, art, government and civil society.

Now, one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior has come to define the generally indefinable idea of the “Hipster.” An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Tara Hunt, Citizen Space’s 35-year-old cofounder and de facto camp counselor. Chris Messina. Blond, bespectacled, and borderline brilliant, the 27-year-old exudes a nerdy charisma. In a world not known for its epic romances, ChrisandTara = Web 2.0’s Brangelina. No one ever said living an open-source life would be easy. Hunt and Messina: open not in a exhibitionist way—posts weren’t sexually explicit —but to make a philosophical point. In their work-obsessed world, the business partnership Hunt and Messina built seemed especially romantic. Messina/Hunt’s blog. “And even after working at it for some time, we finally decided today to end our romantic relationship.” “Breakup 2.0." Most common reaction: “*hugs*." The devastated Hunt: "i want / to be touched again / really touched / not poked or messaged or emailed / touched." The need to disentangle their personal and professional relationships had become obvious. Messina: “Information should be open and free and available. Some things should be private.” A glorious reminder.

(Photo by Adactio/Flickr)

It seems Google is not satisfied with owning over 70% of search—now they want to own the first couple of pages in their search results. So, if you're digg.com, About.com, NYTimes.com, and Wikipedia you're faced with not only being traffic-dependant on Google, you're now competing with them for the traffic within their search result.

This feels exactly like what Microsoft did to its application vendors. Microsoft convinced folks to build WordStar, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and Quattro Pro for their operating system. They grew that business together until the point that Microsoft had massive market-share in operating systems.

Then Microsoft pulled the rug out from under the 3rd party application vendors. The streets were littered with dead software companies, Microsoft faced massive lawsuits, and the industry became stagnant until the Internet shook things up again two decades later.

Frankly, it's insulting to say you're not in the content business and then launch Knol and compete with content companies for their authors, users, and placement in the rankings that you control.

For Google's own good they should not try to take over their own search results. If Google results start showing 20-30% Knol pages and YouTube videos then that is going to drive users away from Google in search of more diversity.

As a hedge we're partnering with Google. We've put 30 of our How To articles into Knol, and we're very big partners with YouTube on our Mahalo Daily show. If you can't beat them join them. If Google is destined to be the new Microsoft then it's best to get into the tent early.

• Give me the offer in writing?
  Good answers: “Yes,” and “Let’s work out the major points and we’ll give you a written offer."
• How does my compensation compare to my peers?
  Your peers: someone who joined at the same time and has the same title.
• What are my options worth?
  Know how many options you have and how they vest. You will have to pay for your options — an option strike price. High strike prices are more common due to high-valuation rounds (Facebook), founder cash-outs, and high 409A valuations.
• What percentage of the company do my options represent on a fully diluted basis?
  People think this number is important—it’s not.
• Can I exercise my unvested options early?
  Exercise options early to pay less taxes in an acquisition or IPO.
• How much money do you have in the bank? How long will it last?
  Investors call this runway. You have a job as long as the company has runway.
• What was the company’s post-money valuation in the last round?
  [Helps determine] the acquisition value of your options.
• What are the investor’s preferences?
  If the acquisition price isn’t greater than the investor’s dominate the board.
• Would I hire the CEO and board to increase the value of my options?
  Don’t join the company if you don’t trust the CEO and board to avoid opportunities to treat their stock better than yours.

These priorities are critical:

• Windows: It’s time to tell our story. We’ll launch a campaign to address any lingering doubts about Vista. We need developers to write unique Windows applications.
• Apple: Apple is thriving because they provide an experience that is narrow but complete. Our commitment to choice comes with compromises. We’re changing.
• Business and enterprise: Never been stronger.
• Software plus services: A platform in the cloud and applications across PCs, phones, TVs, and other devices — an opportunity for us on the desktop.
• Google: We’ll progress against Google upping R&D and acquisitions.
• Yahoo: Yahoo was a tactic, not a strategy. We will get there with or without Yahoo.

Platforms and Services Division will split into two: Windows/Windows Live and Online Services. Nobody is better than we are.

(Photo by AP/Sarbach)

• Tech blogs have shifted from being mostly about tech to mostly about business news, on the false premise that it's more important.
• PR pros have turned blogs into outlets for their press releases and canned stories.
• Bloggers bitch about newspapers, then turn around and emulate them by all running the same story at the same time, then arguing over who was first.
• Factchecking? What's that? (Yes, we drop the ball here sometimes, but it's surprising how often we call a source who tells us we're the only site that bothered.)
• Comments are overrun with jerks, spammers and unwieldy verification systems to prevent them.
• Everyone chases the latest shiny new object, without following up on it in any depth.
• Too many bloggers now have business conflicts of interest that slant their writing.
• There's just too much blogosphere now. Filtering systems like Digg often bury the smarter stuff.

Scoble also complains, "Many of us can seem out of touch with the real world." I'm fine with that. You don't want to read about my mortgage.

(Photo by Mazy Kazerooni)

BoomTown ... appearing onstage at our sixth D: All Things Digital conference ... we posted the whole thing last week ... I ... Yang actually made contact with me ... my 100-day Sacred Cow Countdown ... I was in Seattle ... After our discussion, I published ... as I have written many times ... I have heard from several execs ... I fully expect ... BoomTown is waiting by the phone! ... as I said ... I have some questions for Yang ... I could go on and on, of course.

Kara, you already did.

* Understanding pages: One of the key technologies we have developed to understand pages is associating important concepts to a page even when they are not obvious on the page. A user searching for [cool tech pc vancouver, wa] finds the homepage www.cooltechpc.com even though the page does not mention anywhere that they are in Vancouver, WA.

* Understanding queries: We have a spelling suggestion system, a synonyms system, and a concept analysis system. For example, our algorithms understand that in the query [new york times square church] the user is looking for the well-known church in Times Square and not for articles from the New York Times.

* Understanding users: This work starts with a localization system, and adds to it personalization technology, and several other features. Universal Search. A user looking for [bank] in the US should get American banks, whereas a user in the UK is either looking for the Bank Fashion line or for British financial institutions. The same query can mean entirely different things in different countries. For example, [Côte d'Or] is a geographic region in France - but it is a large chocolate manufacturer in neighboring French-speaking Belgium.

Another case of user intent can be observed for the query [chevrolet magnum]. Magnum is actually made by Dodge and not Chevrolet. So we present the results for Dodge Magnum with the prompt See results for: dodge magnum in our result set.

Universal Search is another example of how we interpret user intent to give them what they (sometimes) really want. Someone searching for [bangalore] not only gets the important web pages, they also get a map, a video showing street life, traffic, etc., and at the time of writing there is relevant news and relevant blogs about Bangalore.

Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) allows users to first discover information that is not in their language, and then using Google's translation technology, we make this information accessible. I call this advance: give me what I want in any language. A user searching for Disney movie songs in Egypt with the query [أغاني أفلام ديزني] is prompted to search the English web.

• Stay up to date with Facebook’s changes to their guidelines, especially in the Developers Wiki.
• If a rule is ambiguous, err on the conservative side. Don’t push the limits.
• Look at other apps, but be wary about borrowing.
• If Facebook has taken any action, As soon as you identify the issue, alter your code and contact Facebook to let them know.
• Focus on building highly engaging apps.
• If you feel like your app is in the clear, spend your time working on the new profile redesign!

Step 1, get noticed. Julia discovered a niche, positioned herself at its choke point, and stayed there until people started to notice. Gawker. A complicated symbiosis was born. Allison could cross "become a cult figure" off her to-do list. Step 2, keep them hooked. Valleywag ran photos of Allison canoodling. "I can't do this anymore. It's ruining my life," she wrote. More than 17,000 readers on her site that day, a new record. Step 3, extend your brand. Newly reinvented as a tech-world ingenue, Allison began entertaining plans to launch her own business. Signed up two friends to act as cofounders of the site — nonsociety.com. Even if her new site is good for nothing more than providing continued fodder for the cannons that are pointed at her, that will be its own kind of success.

(Photo by Platon/Wired)

Dieting and exercising suck. You are not going to have fun. The science is simple: eat fewer calories than your burn. Start quantifying. I use FitDay to track calories. Run a 1,000 calorie per day deficit. Go easy on the drinking. Take up smoking — a zero-calorie alternative. Eat one serving. Drink more coffee, an appetite suppressant. Low-fat ice cream has around 120 calories per half cup. After two weeks, your stomach will shrink. Step two is exercise. It's awful. Use an elliptical machine. Treadmills make you run. One hour per day, hard. You should be close to vomiting. Easy, huh?

(Photo by mandj98)

Mr. Varian, Google’s chief economist, acknowledges that the company has been criticized for its lack of transparency. But he says that the Google approach is a byproduct of its virtue as a fast-moving learning machine. “The system is constantly evolving to optimize efficiency, improve ad quality and make the pricing smarter, so you don’t want set rules that say we do X and we don’t do Y,” [Google chief economist Hal] Varian explained.

Actually, if I'm not mistaken, the company did say they won't do evil, and "trust us" has been the talking point every since. Frankly, I kinda preferred Microsoft's "cross us and we'll crush you." Now that's transparency. Anderson Mancini

Xeni Jardin: There wasn't some kind of sinister plot here. It's just kind of how we did things. But at the time, I did that for personal reasons, and for a back story that will always remain private.

John Battelle: What's made it so good is that it's kind of an asynchronous jam between four musicians, without being in the same place or looking each other in the eye. Anything that we might change that affects that magic, we really have to think about.

Joel Johnson: The community expected us to react with the speed that they reacted.

David Pescovitz: I'm not going to say — I haven't determined — whether I agree or disagree that Xeni should've unpublished the posts.

John Battelle: Isn't it also the right of the person who put it up to take it down? If you were truly the owner, I think one could argue unequivocally that you had that right. The question is: Do you damage the community in doing so?

And a bonus dance remix:

Xeni Jardin: This is my work, this is my blog. This is not the same thing as Wikipedia or the paper of record. It’s Boing Boing.

(Photo by Bart Nagel)