Category: General

Jason Kottke writes about Craigslist (CL): “CL helps lots of people build businesses cheaper and more effectively than more “robust”, complex, and expensive enterprise software solutions. Movers are just one example. CL can help you find employees for your business. If you’ve got a van, you can pick up free furniture and electronics around the city, fix or refurbish, and sell it. You can start a business doing computer troubleshooting, piano lessons, buying and fixing up old motorcycles, or escort and sensual massage services. And if you need something done for your business but don’t have the money to pay for it, you can always barter goods or services in exchange. These are just the obvious examples.”

We can think of Craigslist as enabling “information marketplaces.”

The New York Times writes:

It was 4:30 a.m., the stars were still out and Swami Ramdev was ready to begin the day’s yoga lesson. His 12,000 students watched raptly as he sat wearing little more than a loincloth, chanting morning prayers in Sanskrit. When he walked on his hands across the stage in New Delhi’s cavernous Jawaharlal Nehru stadium, they applauded.

The students were on the final day of a weeklong yoga camp that the swami had promised would cure whatever ailed them, mentally as well as physically, and without a great investment of time. For a growing number of harried middle-class Indians, worrying about health problems associated with a more affluent lifestyle, that is just the message they want to hear.

While a majority of Indians are familiar with yoga, many think it is too complex and time-consuming to practice, particularly with the increasing demands on their time. The swami, youthful and photogenic, has become wildly popular with a “yoga made easy” approach that promises to yield quick health benefits with minimal effort.

His emphasis is on pranayama – roughly put, breathing exercises or the art of breath control. “If you do pranayama half an hour daily, you will never fall sick,” he claims.

It has now been six months since I started my Yoga (from a teacher who follows the Baba Ramdev practice). I do it 3 times a week for an hour – the time split equally between pranayam and a variety of asanas (exercises). It has definitely helped the body to become a lot more flexible and fitter. I just wish I had started it earlier in life!

PressThink writes on one of the most important ideas of 2004 in journalism:

Content is an analytic term. It refers to the “stuff” media carry rather than the carriage system itself. We need a term like that. It’s not a leveler; it’s just neutral. I think what smart people mean when they “hate” the word content is they hate thinking about things in that way. We should talk about literature– not content.

It was another important thing said by Tom Curley, CEO of the Associated Press, in his big speech this year to the Online News Association: “Content will be more important than its container” in the next phase of Web development. “That’s a big shift for old media to come to grips with,” Curley added. “Killer apps, such as search, RSS and video-capture software such as Tivo — to name just a few — have begun to unlock content from any vessel we try to put it in.”

The means are there to unlock content from any vessel we try to put it in. Those vessels are the big media brands themselves, including the flagships of the press fleet. Here’s Admiral Curley telling them that news is becoming unhinged from “brand,” and so we who make news content have to re-locate where we brand it, and think about adding our voice at every step.

“Content will be more important than its container” is thus a disruptive idea in journalism. In a way it is similar to that cross-platform battle-cry in the software biz: write once, run anywhere.

Brad DeLong has a page of links for convincing “adolescents that math is interesting and useful.”

[via Atanu] The New Yorker has a fascinating essay by Atul Gawande which asks: “What happens when patients find out how good their doctors really are?”

In medicine, we are used to confronting failure; all doctors have unforeseen deaths and complications. What were not used to is comparing our records of success and failure with those of our peers. I am a surgeon in a department that is, our members like to believe, one of the best in the country. But the truth is that we have had no reliable evidence about whether were as good as we think we are. Baseball teams have win-loss records. Businesses have quarterly earnings reports. What about doctors?

Somehow, what troubles people isnt so much being average as settling for it. Everyone knows that averageness is, for most of us, our fate. And in certain matterslooks, money, tenniswe would do well to accept this. But in your surgeon, your childs pediatrician, your police department, your local high school? When the stakes are our lives and the lives of our children, we expect averageness to be resisted. And so I push to make myself the best. If Im not the best already, I believe wholeheartedly that I will be. And you expect that of me, too.

[via Atanu] Wired writes: “Logical and precise, left-brain thinking gave us the Information Age. Now comes the Conceptual Age – ruled by artistry, empathy, and emotion.”

The Information Age we all prepared for is ending. Rising in its place is what I call the Conceptual Age, an era in which mastery of abilities that we’ve often overlooked and undervalued marks the fault line between who gets ahead and who falls behind.

To some of you, this shift – from an economy built on the logical, sequential abilities of the Information Age to an economy built on the inventive, empathic abilities of the Conceptual Age – sounds delightful. “You had me at hello!” I can hear the painters and nurses exulting. But to others, this sounds like a crock. “Prove it!” I hear the programmers and lawyers demanding.

OK. To convince you, I’ll explain the reasons for this shift, using the mechanistic language of cause and effect.

The effect: the scales tilting in favor of right brain-style thinking. The causes: Asia, automation, and abundance.

Indexed Forever provides a view from some VCs:

Last night I attended the Churchill Clubs Venture Capital: Whats Hot? Whats Not? On the panel were Jim Breyer of Accel Partners, Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital,
Joe Lacob of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and moderating the panel was yet another venture capitalist, Geoffrey Yang of Redpoint Ventures.

After a superb comedic introduction by Yang, the panel settled into mostly violent agreement on the topics.

Hot Digital Home, particularly component plays. Software with Open Source components or delivered as a managed service. Later stage deals in China.

Not Packaged Enterprise Software. Storage. Semiconductors. Nanotech (for decade).

Breyer restated his belief in content deals and peer-to-peer networks as he said at last years event. Oddly he suggested that distribution through retailers and PC OEMs was promising its 1994 all over.

Gurley pushed his belief in the future of multiplayer gaming, mobile devices and security.

Yang closed with a few thoughts. We are entering a bubble in internet media companies that have search or local in their business plans. We are entering a bubble in investing in China.

[via Om Malik] Umair Haque writes:

Connected music players will totally reshape the future of music distribution. Record stores haven’t vanished because, let’s face it, shopping for music is fun – part of our utility in consuming media is sampling different goods.

When you combine connected music players with RFID, you get a whole new ecosystem of possbilities for music distribution. Ponder this for a second. RFID opens up whole new kinds of network possibilities for media goods in retail locations. The most obvious is record stores which can beam tracks directly into your iPod without a massive infrastructure investment, while you walk around different listening stations (or similar scenario).

But my money is on clubs becoming music distributors/retailers – when you go to a club, you can get the DJ set or selected tracks beamed into your player. This is a natural evolution for clubs, the most iconic of which (Tresor, Ministry) have evolved naturally into labels with dedicated shops. There are huge synergies here – we go to clubs to hear the tracks DJ’s have selected – that’s the value they add. But we don’t get to consume them later without incurring significant additional cost (ie, tracking down the right tracks on the right CDs at the right record stores). Eliminating this additional cost creates huge gains for consumers.

[via Amy Wohl] Jaerd Spoll asks: “What does it mean, from a design standpoint, when someone desires a design to be intuitive?”

In our research, weve discovered that there are two conditions where users will tell you an interface seems intuitive to them. It only takes meeting one of the two conditions to get the user to tell you the design is intuitive. When neither condition is met, the same user will likely complain that the interface feels unintuitive.

Condition #1:
Both the current knowledge point and the target knowledge point are identical. When the user walks up to the design, they know everything they need to operate it and complete their objective.

Condition #2:
The current knowledge point and the target knowledge point are separate, but the user is completely unaware the design is helping them bridge the gap. The user is being trained, but in a way that seems natural.

The biggest challenge in making a design seem intuitive to users is learning where the current and target knowledge points are. What do users already know and what do they need to know? To build intuitive interfaces, answering these two questions is critical.

For identifying the users current knowledge, we favor field studies. Watching potential users, in their own environments, working with their normal set of tools, and facing their daily challenges, gives us tremendous insight in what knowledge they will have and where the upper bounds are. Teams receive a wealth of valuable information with every site visit.

For identifying necessary target knowledge for important tasks, usability testing is a favorite technique of ours. When we sit users in front of a design, the knowledge gap becomes instantly visible.

The Economist writes about eBay’s initiative in this area:

eBay, the world’s leading online auction business, has come up with an innovative way to encourage people to sell, donate or recycle their old machines over the internet. A web-based program reads the redundant computer’s components and gives its specifications (like its memory and processor speed). Owners can then ascertain the value of their old PC, put it up for sale and get a special mailing kit to simplify shipping. The site also makes it easy to donate a PC to charity or get it to a nearby recycler.