Month: February 2004

Questions are fun, but answers make money.

Just thought I’d share that phrase I just IMed someone. Seems relevant before 6:30am PT. We’ll see if it is later in the day.

Needed to turn the brain off for a bit last night, so I spent two hours with a quick re-read of the Dick Francis novel 10 Lb. Penalty. As usual, this did the trick. I wish there was a Francis I had not read yet. Since this is his 36th novel (and this isn’t his most recent), maybe there is one I missed. I’ll have to check!

10 Lb. Penalty one gives a peek into British politics and the system for electing MPs. Maybe this fictional account is misleading, but campaign finance does seem to be under a bit more control, at least nominally, since you can only spend so much per voter and you have to account for it all. Maybe this is too optimistic, and maybe there is ‘soft’ money awash in the British system, too, but I’d like to imagine that the American political system could find a model for leveling the playing field a bit somehow.

Spent 30 minutes or so cleaning up the CNET News.com listings on Syndic8. Not sure it matters, but I was bothered by the duplication and the scraped feeds listed right next to the official feeds.

Mary Hodder shared, in her report from day two of the Digital Media Summit, this tiny tidbit.

I chatted with Craig Calder of NYT Digital, who told me that their archives generate around $1 million a year in revenue, but it’s declining. He said mostly what’s accessed is less than 90 days old, but the revenue is still revenue.

This kind of revenue figure is always interesting to see. I’ll take it on face value because I have no other choice. I’m also going to assume that this is direct archive revenue, not via Lexis-Nexis, Factiva, etc. I expect those sources remain much higher revenue streams for the larger NYTimes company, if not the digital division.

Several questions come to mind. Is their revenue declining because their archive is less accessible than most, due to registration? Is it declining because there are alternate ways to retrieve similar information that bring them less revenue? (Factiva, Highbeam, etc.) Is it declining because no links to their archives (back to the accessibility)? Is it declining because the newshounds of the world know how to use the NYTimes link generator to create a link that will remain free to all as long the NYTimes continues to quietly support the blog links? I’d be amazed if this kind of linking has really an impact of note, but the more people that read the NYTimes.com information via blogs/aggregators, the more these free links spread.

I wouldn’t turn down $1 million in revenue, but strategically, for NYTD, I can imagine that they don’t spend much time worrying about this. As long as they can control their archive (whether or not it’s profitable), they can work on ways to make their business generate more cash.

Friend of a friend (FOAF) is for representing your social network in an XML file. Some people are doing interesting things with this, but for now, I’ll just save a link to a FOAF generator. Maybe in the future, as the social networking craze turns into something useful, rather than simply like collecting baseball cards.

I found the generator via Stephen Downes’ article The Semantic Social Network.

That is Jeff Jarvis‘s phrase from his commentary on Nisenholtz’s speech at SIIA. Jarvis is saying that citizen’s media is the Pong for digital media. Blogs are just the first step, but — despite Nisenholtz’s cautiousness — the future is here. I wrote my thoughts on the speech on the same day. I found it important, but not necessarily visionary. But I need to read Jarvis’s entire essay. He has more experience with media than me. I still believe that counts for something. 😉 [found Jarvis essay via napsterization.org]

Well, not really, but Doc Searls is providing some pointers from Demo. I’m sure there are lots of other Demo blogs out there. I’m curious to see which items are more than a flash in the pan.

Update: Technorati method for following the buzz about Demo.

That’s my hope. Napsterization.org thinks it does. Just added this feed to NNW.

We all commit this crime every day of our lives: answering a question without knowing, for sure, the answer. I don’t mean knowing in any existential sense. I simply mean that, given time, a good library and/or search engine, you could find a citable reference for answering with the information you provide, or a close fascimile… rather than the mix of knowledge, blather, and everything in between that we all just live with. I do it myself plenty. My wife has taken to asking me if I really know the answer, or I’m just doing my “answer-boldly-and-confidently-and-see-if-that-works” routine. I’ll admit that there are times I’ve earned that suspicion, despite actually knowing quite a few things (often without really knowing why… trivia fills the memory!). Still, everyone once in a while you just want to be trusted as an all-knowing source.

The problem is, I have someone who does trust me as an all-knowing source, my son, and I want to give him the real answer every time. He’s a sponge, like any young child, and I cringe every time I elide my response or otherwise provide him with bad information. Today, he read the numbers on his cousin’s door right-to-left, and I explained to him that we read left-to-right. He, like most three-year-olds, asked “Why?”

I don’t know. So I told him “I don’t know. It’s an accident of history.” Which seemed to satisfy him, but left me itching to know the answer. I can’t really judge whether this source is definitive, but supposedly I was right. The Greeks found it easier (because more people are right-handed? easier to write left to right, and reading just followed?), and here we are. If anyone knows more details, I’m all ears. The boy doesn’t care anymore, but I do.

Wonder how many wrong answers I gave him today?

I really only do anything, to date, with pencoyd.com, but I own three others, and I’ve let a previous one or two go. Back in the boom days (1999), I was actively working on iventing.com… a one-time business idea much akin to what planetfeedback.com was doing, before they were bought by Intelliseek. I ask the question because I’m curious about how long before we all have our own home server and the idea of hiring/finding hosting goes away for all but the largest commercial websites. I do know, from direct experience, that no one really wants to run their own webserver, but as the software and hardware and bandwidth all improve to the home, how long can it be before we all have a server at the home? 10 years? Maybe IPv6 needs to be a full-fledged reality, but all these pieces will converge… although by the time they do, no one will bother to think about the server, any more than they think about the cable box (one candidate for the home server, of course!).

Returning to the present, I need to figure out the right mix of low-hassle, low-price hosting services. I’ve got low price going for the almost dormant domains, and I’ve got low-hassle going for pencoyd.com. I haven’t found the combo yet, although I haven’t stretched myself to look yet. Hard enough to find time to keep pencoyd.com mildly vibrant.