Day: July 17, 2006

Andy Kessler has a blog, fortunately. I haven’t read it before, but I’ll take a peek now, after reading Wall Street Meat: My Narrow Escape from the Stock Market Grinder, courtesy of David.

As promised, the paperback was a gulp on the airplane this weekend. Juicy, breezy, broken up even across a two-page spread into digestible moments… this tell-all of stock analysts in the late 1980s and into the Internet-fueled 1990s is irresistible. Despite some wrap-up comments at the end attempting to bring his gossip up to a higher level, Meat really amuses because (a) Kessler doesn’t hold much back, even burning some bridges (surely) and (b) this 2003 book seems so obvious in hindsight. But few were talking while the bubble was burning (to mix at least two metaphors). Must have helped book sales to be able to namedrop about Grubman, Meeker, Blodget and Quattrone. As a current hedge-fund manager and investor, Kessler probably doesn’t need the money from book sales, but he’s clearly still having fun. I wonder if those who work with him currently are more or less cautious now? In an age of blogs like ValleyWag, I suppose fearing a book author’s influence is hardly top of mind anymore.

Only bad news about Kessler’s blog? Doesn’t seem to be updated very often.

Oscar Lewis’s popular history of the Comstock Lode foursome, Silver Kings: The Lives and Times of Mackay, Fair, Flood and O’Brien, Lords of the Nevada Comstock Lode was published in 1947, and then republished in 1986 by the University of Nevada Press. All of which is to say… I couldn’t find a great place to link to.

Living in San Francisco, where much of the money plucked from the east side of the Sierra Nevada mountains was spent, you can still see the legacy of this foursome. Silver Kings points out some of the obvious landmarks (Pacific Union Club, Fairmont Hotel), but it’s not an urban history of San Francisco. Rather, this book dwells on Mackay and Fair, breezes through O’Brien, and doesn’t show much love for Flood. The telling part is how little was known about the early lives of these men, and how much yellow journalism colored the tales of even their very public lives during the late 1860s and onwards, as their wealth influenced most of the West Coast. This was mostly an enjoyable read… by popular history, I meant that Lewis never misses a chance for an anecdote, even when he admits it’s probably mythical. There is a short bibliography, but I’ll look elsewhere for a more complete tale of the history of San Francisco between Gold Rush and 1906 quake. That’s an era which I’d like to know more about, so suggestions welcome.

(I’m making the connection in the headline, even if no one else would.)

The blog measurement service Measure Map craaawwwwllllssss. I know… I’ve been using it for months, even before Google acquired the project from Adaptive Path.

Today, I read that FeedBurner bought BlogBeat, expressly to beef up their analytics. And I say to myself… Measure Map is going to have to change radically to pull a rabbit out of this hat.

Jeff Veen is one savvy guy, but he and any other folks working at Google on Measure Map have been well-nigh invisible for a long time. The acquisition was in mid-February, 2006, five months ago. Since then… zip.

I’ve been pondering a blog post about Measure Map’s performance issues for weeks, and on June 22, I decided to complain in the forums, first, before I blogged about how disappointed I’ve been. Veen replied five days later with

Yeah, we’ve certainly been experiencing some performance issues lately as part of some migration work we’re doing. There are fixes coming relatively soon, and we’ll post updates when they happen.

I’d hope for more from someone who gets it like Veen. (He helped build the original Hotwired, for crying out loud.) But Veen’s “lately” translates to “forever” for me. Truly, since the first day I started using Measure Map, it’s been slow, and it’s gotten worse. Also, Veen promised “relatively soon” for fixes and updates, but we’re coming up on one month from my original post. Look at the ghost-town that is the only public feedback forum those of us currently using the service are encouraged to use, a Google Group. And, as others have pointed, where’s the blog?

Why have I put up with this pokiness for so long?

First, the visual architecture engaged me. Measure Map was developed with blogs in mind. Over time, I’ve come to miss some of the more traditional ideas, like pageviews, but from first glimpse (at a TechCrunch party last year, when I asked nicely for an invite), I’ve appreciated the simplicity and focus brought to the task.

Second, my blog is not my job. It’s a hobby, which alternately consumes and frustrates me. I know quite a bit about how to make websites better, and my blog feels to me like the shoemaker’s children: painfully un-shod. So, I care about the numbers and the audience, but not enough to spend time trying every service out there (yes, Scott, my to-do list include MyBlogLog as an alternative).

I’ve mused at length before into web sites already, so why not merge analytics across the platforms?

Note: in writing this blog post, I tried to load my Measure Map statistics, but got the all-too-familiar warning

Sorry, I’m having issues. Please try again later or contact [email protected].

That’s… (deep breath) …unfortunate.

I’m not going to pull Measure Map from clock yet, but I am going to add another service in the near future. BlogBeat doesn’t appear to be an option at this time, during assimilation, so we’ll see what’s available when I get around to it.

Saw this last week, but still worth sharing, especially since the Wall Street Journal print edition even felt it amusing to tell its audience about the plethora of Zidane animations. Here’s Anil Dash’s Zidane World Cup Headbutt Animation Festival, a best (?) of compilation. Never let it be said that editors are dead.