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- After the Dust Settles: HologramsNovember 5
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Funny - after a monumental election eve, one of the big reactions from the tech meme-sphere is not to the election, but to CNN’s holograms (which I haven’t even seen). Of course, there are some people talking about the real stuff: check out “Say no to tech Tzars” and “Obamanomics” for hologram-free spins on the tech implications of the election.
No Tags - Google Blogsearch: the Techmeme sapperOctober 2
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Quickly posting a comment that I made at RWW, on Google’s “techmeme killer” blogsearch:
I always thought Techmeme was running an “acquire me” strategy, or something - by staking out a niche and sitting on it. Otherwise, it didn’t seem to make any sense - Gabe obviously has an awesome technology which he never seemed to take to its logical conclusion. Deploying it in a few silos as he did and then just tweaking it meant that eventually it was going to get passed by someone with more reach/resources/marketing.
I’d say Techmeme needed to take funding and expand into a proper network about 24 months ago. Or, he needed to have gotten acquired somewhere along the way like blogdigger and the others. It will be interesting to see if the memeorandum family will drop off sharply, stagnate, or find a way to muster growth. Just my $0.02, from someone that dabbled in the memetracking space before giving up in frustration (all respect due to Gabe for crafting a great product).
I guess maybe this will finally spur tailrank to shut down. Just checked out tailrank and its down for a “db upgrade.” Hmmm.
blogsearch, google, tailrank, techmeme - Stubhub RevistedSeptember 25
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Looks like the stubhub scam is still in force, much to people’s ongoing frustration. This is complemented by a weirdly apologist article that I saw in the Victoria Times Colonist today - Internet Lets Ticket Buyers Jump the Gun.
Typically, the article misses most of the salient points about the questionable dynamics of internet ticket sales, but it does bring to light one interesting development - TickMaster’s response to StubHub has been not to find a way to defeat ticket scalpers and fairly sell tickets at stated prices, but to build their own “secondary market” StubHub clone - TicketsNow. Is it Tickets Now? Or Ticket Snow? Because consumers are getting snowed by the secondary ticket market, and are being sold a story that somehow this is value-added to them:
“It’s totally accepted,” Blasko said of sanctioned scalping, the majority of which exists on Internet sites. “There are a lot of [fans] out there that depend on it and don’t mind paying those premiums.”
In order to meet demand, official sellers are either forced to work with scalpers or run their own secondary websites, at which they legally sell tickets at inflated prices.
Ticketmaster, the world
- Yahoo and Bain: What’s Really Going OnSeptember 25
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Kara Swisher throws Yahoo!’s engagement with Bain into the limelight today, with a gleeful, gloating, and ultimately fatuous article. In it, she posits the Office Space scenario - that Bain is Yang’s fall guy who he’s going to ask to justify a bunch of layoffs. Having dealt with similar management consultants personally, I’ve got a little bit of a different slant.
1) They does occasionally recommend things other than lay-offs
2) They are a stalling mechanism for executives that are trying to figure out how to address an issue, but who can’t keep the BOD happy in the meantime
3) Jerry is bringing them in to have a story to sell the board - the story is not whatever the consultants recommend, its that consultants came in, got paid a bunch, and did a lot of analysis
4) That story buys Jerry time
5) Sometimes BOD’s need to hear news from someone other than their company’s executives
6) That story may include layoffs, it may not
7) If it does include layoffs, they may actually happen, or they may notSo - in a nutshell - I’ve seen consultants used as a tool to calm activist boards by ensuring directors that real money is being spent on “real” experts. I’ve seen their recommendations be put into practice - and I’ve seen them go from the board room table to the recycling
- IE7 Hanldes Flash Way Better than Firefox3September 24
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I’ve been working on a little project that requires loading and manipulating a lot of Flash embeds in HTML pages. Each of these embeds loads and plays a MediaFire hosted MP3. After playing about 10 or so in FireFox, the Flash player stops behaving nicely and just stalls out at “Buffering…” making it impossible to play any more tracks. Fixing it requires a FF re-start. Internet Explorer 7 does not have this problem. Conclusion: I’m switching to IE.
flash ie firefox