I don’t know very much about this blog. It is very good though, as I have been reading it for a couple weeks now. Essentially, it takes everything that the different candidates have done and actually runs a fact check of them. I had always wondered exactly how truthful some of the things these candidates say are and now I know.
The worst part about this blog is the fact that every single candidate has said things that don’t really pan out well. Its sad but “Politicians lie” exists because it works. Maybe this blog is the start of making that disappear.
Its sort of amazing to see it sync together so well. I am honestly in awe to see it work that well. I wonder if its a programming trick or something.
Right now, banner ads have a problem, they all have pretty bad performance rates, and this is due to the ads themselves pretty much sucking. The problem being, everyone just sees an ad space the same way they see a commercial. this is all you can really do, the closest to innovation is something like hte orbitz minigames. yet, when you see an advertisement like this, what it shows is that there is a lot of creative space out there, creative space which has not been explored. There is currently a void in creative advertisements, the first companies to excel at it will hit it big. The first companies who hire these creative gurus will find themselves with ads like Apples.
On a side note, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a standardized web page design for ad spaces?
Always a 728×90 on top, always a 300×350 on the side? Right now, something like this almost has to be designed from the ground up for the specific site.
Gizmodo has a small post on the new Radeon R680 here, and essentially says the speed of it is equivalent to 1000x cray-1 supercomputers. Whenever I read something like this, it always boggles my mind. The Cray one was first installed in 1976.
Thinking about that, I wonder what it would be like to go back in time only 30 years, and talk to those developers.
“In 30 years, we will have computers that are a thousand times faster just to make our games look prettier”.
This post by Nicholas Carr is the best post I’ve seen on Knol.
Wikipedia is a very funny thing. I guess I’m actually late to the boat on it. It is a great place to find information on pretty much anything. When I was curious about a football team, Wikipedia answers my question. Video game? Wikipedia. Pretty much anytime I’ve really needed to find an answer, I have found Wikipedia to be one of the top hits. Its to the point that I now add “wiki” as an addition to my searches in order to get the wikipedia result. In many cases, Google is now just my portal to Wiki.
The more interesting question is going to be for Wikipedia, which is, what now?
The big news today was Bebo creating their own language which mimics the facebook application FBML. The idea was essentially to allow developers to easily port from a Facebook app to a Bebo app. Everyone is talking about it in terms of the Bebo side, but I wonder whether this could be the first tentative step for Facebook to solve the Death problem.
Internet history (all 10 years of it) has shown time and time again that social networking sites do not survive very well. We have seen the coming and going of Friendster and MySpace. There was also pseudo social sites like Xanga and AsianAvenue. Users have shown time and time again that they will happily jump ship and in relatively short amounts of time. So, what is the solution to live?
The answer is, become a platform. I don’t just mean facebook apps, I mean, become the base platform in which everyone else runs. I mean a company like Ning. By allowing others to build the social network, everyone wins. As different networks become popular, Ning will be around as the backend, for users, it means no need to recreate profiles, even for individual networks, it means they have ready access to a large pool of possible users. It streamlines the process of life and death of networks. The main problem that Ning runs into right now, which is where Facebook currently has the great advantage is in sheer size. Facebook already has a large user base, one which social networking companies would give money hand over fist to build off of. If Facebooks competitors all were building their platform off of Facebook’s data, they will always have the advantage. This is in fact what Ning is hoping to build off of.
Still haven’t completely composed all my thoughts on this yet, maybe more to come.
Here is my guess though, if Facebook does not open up more, a lot more than just helping to build a mimic to FBML, you will see Ning (or competitor) begin to win in the coming years.
UPDATE: HERE is someone explaining what I’m thinking in much better words than I can. Though from the Bebo point of view as opposed to Facebooks.
I don’t have much to say yet, but isn’t it interesting that in the same spaces which sometimes run ineffective, flashing ads which bother users, you can also get advertising which would provoke a user to record and upload?
