Zoli's Blog

Helping Bloggers in India

Posted on July 19, 2006 ·

India is a democracy, I simply don’t believe the current blog censorship will stay in force for very long… but for now it hurts. I myself have Indian readers, and I also follow some blogs based in India, in our global world I’m sure most of my readers do so. Bloggers from all around the world are trying to help. Here are just two of several resources: India Censored, Bloggers Collective.

I’d like to do my little bit, in case the ways to circumvent to blockage don’t work for someone, I’m offering my fellow bloggers from India a temporary home for your thoughts; email me your articles and I’ll publish them on my blog, under your name. (My email is the domain name of this blog at gmail)

Technorati : censorship, india, indiacensored.com, indian bloggers

Filed Under: Blogging, Collaboration, Politics ·

Elections Radically Revamped

Posted on July 19, 2006 ·

“Officials at the U.S. Federal Election Commission stressed that voting should be used for entertainment purposes only, saying that the actual odds of a citizen making a difference are 1 in 440,000.”

Read about the new Scratch ‘N Win Ballots at The Onion.

Technorati : ballotts, elections, humor, politics

Filed Under: Humor, Politics ·

Microsoft: Crimes Against the English Language Quantified :-)

Posted on July 18, 2006 ·

Ethan “Zvents” Stock caught yet-another-incomprehensible-corporate-press-release:

Nortel and Microsoft Form Strategic Alliance to Accelerate Transformation of Business Communications: Shared vision for unified communications to drive new growth opportunities for both companies.

No, this is not the first paragraph, it’s just the title. A crime against the English Langue, says Ethan, and I agree. Ethan contrasts it to “the gold standard for communicating meaning without baloney“: Winston Churchill’s famous final paragraph of his 1940 “We shall fight on the beaches” speech.

I thought I’d run som numbers on these two gems.

The Gunning-Fog Readability Test is a rough measure of how many years of schooling it would take for someone to understand the content. The lower the number, the more understandable the content is. Results over seventeen are reported as seventeen, where seventeen is considered post-graduate level.

Microsoft-Nortel: 17 (maxed out at post-graduate level)
Winston Churchill: 12.66

For reference, here are some typical index scores:

6 TV guides, The Bible, Mark Twain
8 Reader’s Digest
8 – 10 Most popular novels
10 Time, Newsweek
11 Wall Street Journal
14 The Times, The Guardian
15 – 20 Academic papers
Over 20 Only government sites can get away with this, because you can’t ignore them.
Over 30 The government is covering something up

My own little test shows most business blogs are in the 8-10 range. Ethan scores 9.83, I am rated 8.38.

Now, let’s take another most scientific test: the Gematriculator. “The Gematriculator is a service that uses the infallible methods of Gematria developed by Mr. Ivan Panin to determine how good or evil a web site or a text passage is.” The results:

Microsoft-Nortel: 50% Evil, 50% Good
Winston Churchill: 29% Evil 71% Good
Your site: ___ (?)

Now, if you ask me, no, I don’t believe in pseudo-science… but it’s 105 degrees outside

Technorati : Churchill, Communication Style, Comprehension, Corporate BS, Gematriculator., Microsoft, Nortel, PR, Readability

Filed Under: Blogging, Humor, Misc ·

RFID Passports beginning in late August – and they’re Completely hackable

Posted on July 18, 2006 ·

Imagine being overseas and your identity being available for the taking – your nationality, your name, your passport number. Everything. .. AND IT GETS BETTER…The equipment needed to skim an RFID chip neither has to be large nor expensive. Nokia sells cell phones capable of reading RFID chips. Texas Instruments sells kits to do the same thing.

Bush’s Candid Moment – Take #2 :-)

Posted on July 17, 2006 ·

This morning I am getting a surprisingly large number of hits on an older post: Bush’s Candid Moment. They candid part in that video:

“WOMAN: … and I’m sorry I’m rambling on like I have –
BUSH: So was I though, for like an hour –
[laughter]”

But why are people reading it today? Let’s look at the visitor log: the typical search-terms are Bush, candid, video. Gotcha! They are loking for the President’s unguarded comments he slipped to British PM Tony Blair before lunch at the G8 summit:

“See, the irony is, what they really need to do is to get Syria to get Hizbollah to stop doing this s**t,”

Seconds later Tony Blair discovered the microphone was on, and switched it off before responding.

Watch the video on Sky News. I wonder how long before this shows up on Youtube, which just announced it is serving up a hundred millionvideos a day….

Technorati : blair, bush, bush shit, bushisms, lebanon, middle east, politics, youtube

Filed Under: Blogging, Humor, Misc, Politics ·

Email is Still Not Dead

Posted on July 17, 2006 ·

( Updated )
Yet-another-email-is-dead-article, this time from the Chicago Tribune, via Paul Kedrosky. It’s the same old argument: teenagers using IM, or increasingly SMS, instead of email which they find cumbersome, slow and unreliable – hence email usage will decline.

I beg to disagree. Sure, I also get frustrated by the occasional rapid-fire exchange of one-liners, when by the 15th round we both realize the conversation should have started on IM. Most of teenagers’ interaction is social, immediate, and SMS works perfectly well in those situations.

But ask teenage entrepreneur Ben Casnocha how many emails he receives and responds to daily on his Blackberry, even while sitting in class – I know first hand he responds fast. We all enter business, get a job..etc sooner or later, just not at age 12 like Ben with. Our communication style changes along with that – often requiring to a build-up of logical structure, sequence, or simply a written record of facts, and email is vital for this type of communication.

Email is being “attacked” from another direction though: for project teams, planning activity, collaboratively designing a document, staging an event… etc email is a real wasteful medium. Or should I say, it’s the perfect place for information to get buried. This type of communication is most effective using a wiki.

No, email is not dead, and it won’t be any time soon. But we all have to learn to use the right tool in the right situation.

Update (7/20): A day after my post the Email is Dead discussion flares up again:

Email is Officially Old School says Steve Rubel
Changing Online Behavior: Email is Old – Emergence Media
youth and email: the fear factor – Blogspotting
Email Gets Old – Ataridemocrat
Leaving Email Behind – Business Blog Consulting

Update (9/7): Rod Boothby created this chart:

Technorati : IM, SMS, collaboration, email, wiki, wikis

Filed Under: Blogging, Collaboration, Personal Productivity, Social Networking, Software ·

Crowdsourced Software = Your Second Best Idea + Digg + Open Source Community + Incentives + … ?

Posted on July 17, 2006 ·

Recently my friend, Chris Yeh organized a special SDForum event, “Your Second Best Idea“, where he brought together:

Creative thinkers who have a killer idea to build a company – if only they had the time
Entrepreneurial types who’d love to make it happen, but lack the “big idea”
Venture Capitalists, Angels who would fund it all (?)

Chris’s concept was that after brief idea-presentations the participants would “bid” to team up with the idea owner based on their initial plans to execute and an equity offer to the owner. And if all runs well, perhaps a VC will jump in, too. I had some doubts on how far the process can go in one short event, but it was certainly an interesting experiment. We heard ideas, the crowd discussed them, but we never got to the point of entrepreneurs bidding for the ideas – which somewheat masked the underlying big question:

What’s the value of an idea? In a different context, as part of the NDA discussion I’ve previously stated tha ideas by themselves were not that valuable, it’s the entrepreneur behind the idea that makes or breaks the startup. Well, if that’s true, than how much equity is an idea presented in 5 minutes worth? And if that’s all the idea-owner had, hasn’t he/she just given it away for free?

While the inaugural session did not answer these questions, I’ve recently heard about Canada-based Cambrian House whose entire business model is based on Chris’s concept .. and more. Here’s how they explain it:

So the creative types submit an idea, the community votes (here’s the digg-effect), others will develop it, Cambrina House markets the product. All contributors to this “supply chain” will share the profit, according to a Royalty Point system. All projects start with 1500 Royalty Points, and submitting an idea is worth 75 out of the 1500, so if my math is correct, that’s a 5% equity for the raw idea – pretty high, if you ask me.

What noone can predict for now is whether those Royalty Points will ever get converted to real money, and at what rate.

Does Cambrian House have a sustainable business? I have no clue… and I suspect nor do the contributors, or even the Founders of Cambrian. In todays heated entrepreneurial environment apparently being radically different is good enough (and being a serial entrepreneur doesn’t hurt, either), so they landed $2.5M in funding from aptly named Adventure Capital in Alberta, Canada. This funding will go a long way, as they essentially outsourced everything, not paying contributors until profits roll in. I guess we can say their currency is hope:-)

The Cambrians certainly know how to create awareness: in 16 days of existence they had 100K site visitors, there daily reach per Alexa is in the top 100 in Canada. They are not afraid of unusual publicity stunts, although frankly Feeding Google was more about noise than being smart: followed by cameras, completely unannounced, they descended on the Google campus with 1000 pizzas at 3pm. Did you get that? Google, as in Google the company famous for it’s free g ourmet food, at 3pm, as in just after luch, before dinner – no wonder they were soon escorted off campus. Cambrian guys, I have a free idea for you: next time set up camp with your 1000 pizzaz at Stanford, you’ll be heroes and won’t leave without 100’s of new ideas…and I don’t even want 75 points, just invite me for the pizza-fest.