This Year's posts

Archive for April, 2005

Dave Sifry on Entrepreneurship

Saturday, April 16th, 2005

I just came across some slides from a speech by Dave Sifry, CEO of Technorati and a serial entrepreneur, called Rules for Entrepreneurs.

Very interesting. I’ll list the rules here, hopefully making them more accessible than the PDF he has them in and easier for me to find later.

  1. Never fear mistakes.
  2. There are no dumb questions.
  3. Serendipity is your friend.
  4. Know yourself.
  5. Know your customer- LISTEN.
  6. Know your competition.
  7. Vision is easy. Execution is hard.
  8. Focus, focus, focus!
  9. Get a great team.
  10. Don’t forget your friends.
  11. Understand your business model.
  12. Never ask someone to do something you wouldn’t do yourself.
  13. Do good.
  14. Do it because you love it.
  15. Dream. You can change the world.

Then he says:

Wait!

  • Don’t rush it.
  • Spend parents’ money.
  • Explore, experiment!

Then he has ‘5 Tips.’

  • Incorporate in Delaware
  • Everybody vests
  • Do your own due diligence
  • Beware of nepotism
  • Get an employment contract.

Jon Udell on language evolution in del.icio.us

Saturday, April 16th, 2005

John Udell hasan interesting video on language in delicious.

I really like his closing line:

Is this how we’ll create the semanic web? I think it is.

Doug Cutting

Thursday, April 14th, 2005

It’s been a week, but I keep meaning to blog about this…

Last Thursday night Lucene and Nutch gave a lecture in my Internet Systems Research class.

He had a lot of very interesting stuff to talk about, especially conerning how to manage open source projects.

By far, though, the coolest things he talked about were Map/Reduce and GFS (Google File System), two technologies created at Google, which they’ve implemented in Nutch!

This is exciting because it means there will soon be a way to create grid-based systems with an open source platform.

Unhappy at Disneyland

Wednesday, April 13th, 2005

A Flickr set of unhappy people at Disneyland.

via:Boing Boing.

Yeah, posted by Cory Doctorow- very ironic.

Folow up on Microformats

Wednesday, April 13th, 2005

There’s been a lot of discussion around the Semantic Web and microformats and I’d like to follow up on some comments I’ve received.

It seems that much of the opposition to Microformats amounts to “but RDF|OWL|Whatever is more powerful|expressive|extensible than XHML|micorformats.” (See this comment for an example.)

I agree completely. I don’t think XHTML is nearly as expressive as RDF and Friends.

The problem with such arguments is that they seem to make the power or expressiveness of a particular technology the most important factor, whereas I believe the Web is a platform for *people* to be expressive. So the measure should not be “how expressive is this technology?” but “how much does this encourage and facilitate personal expression?”*

Why?

power != utility

Usefulness is more important than power and we must walk the fine line between power and usability, which is probably exponentially harder than either of the component problems.

Notes

  • I do realize that much of the Web (esp. in this Web 2.0 world), is for machine consumption, not human. Yet, I think comprehensibility is still vital(see my comment here). For example, how many people learned HTML by viewing other people’s source? Comprehensible technologies enable innovation.