Attention == Money.

One can derive the following thoughts:

For each click-thru Google makes money.
For each customer you keep happy by giving them attention, you can make money.
If you are a luxury provider and give the customers even more attention, you can make even more money.
If you don’t pay attention, you won’t make money.

Each link on the web requires the attention of the user, and creates opportunities for the pages that they land on. If the creators of the page pay attention to providing for the user, they make money, or they lose out to something that attracts the user’s attention away.

Also, Shifts in attention can cause store X to register a sale over store y on a comparison shopping engine. So products/stores also compete for attention.

In a similar way, People compete for attention on Social Networking sites…

Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame has turned into an online currency. And now it’s briefer than 15 minutes, it’s a click. A click of fame.

From Muscut.org

one of the funniest posts I have seen regarding usability, and it is so true. The site is simple but not so usable…

I think banning your own website in protest of the policy is just lame. The real problem is, Silicon Valley-based companies are not hiring enough international people or contracting locals to monitor illegal content.
Youtube almost does a good job now, to abide American law and is self-monitoring copyrighted content to not piss the RIAA and the record labels off.

Ebay does a good job blocking pro-Nazi articles from being sold on the French and German websites. They self-monitor these to abide the laws of those countries so they can keep raking in their profits.

In the case of Turkey, you can not insult Ataturk, you can not insult Turkishness and that is the law. So if youtube wants remain in business there it will need to abide the law. Their decision to remain in business largely depends on how profitable the Turkish ad market is, and unfortunately advertising in Turkey is run by monopolies and it is really difficult even for Google to profit from the Turkish market. You can see how spam-infested the Turkish google.com.tr is, and how low the quality of the Google Adwords copy are. Most startups or rather newly started web 2.0 websites unfortunately don’t see any money making opportunities in Turkey so they don’t think it’s worth investing in the market. This will need to be changed as there are 20 million Internet users there.

So far, no Turkish-run websites have been banned, which proves my point. Also, Facebook employs 2 customer service reps who speak Turkish, that’s probably why they are not getting banned.

I think instead of speculatively broadcasting that Turkey bans websites in order to create more hits for their own websites, these self-banning bloggers should make the effort to fight against monopolies such as Dogan Holding who abuse their media power. Also, they should campaign to encourage foreign companies to pay attention to the Turkish market by investing in at least a few employees to run the ad operations and monitor the content. It’s not that bad of a market, there just needs to be more competition and more pressure from the outside.

so the sun is behind the earth now, so the earth casts a shadow on the moon, but only partially from our perspective in Istanbul.

Quite interesting.

I think Nokia N95 still is a better phone, until iPhone supports 1-a 5MP digital camera and a powerful flash + video recording 2-a GPS 3-3G 4-an easy way for people to install applications 5-an easy way for people to roam to other countries and be able to plug in whatever SIM card they want in.. I don’t think I will switch. But we’ll see tomorrow.

I ran across a picture on fffound.com which is a collaborative image discovery tool /showcase. It applies usability to fruits.
I always think of how hard it is to peel fruit. and I typically don’t eat apples because they are too hard to peel, so I got a kick out of seeing this.

Check out the usability of fruit.

Looking at Paul Graham’s own YCombinator’s investment portfolio, it does have leave much to be desired in terms of boldness. I feel that for someone asking the VC industry to be more bold, you’d expect that they’d be contributing more funds and taking on more risk. And… how much is a typical YCombinator investment again? 10-20k? Wow! That’s a lot of money. Especially for a new college grad, that is, -which is the typical participant in the YCombinator program-. The 10-20k guarantees a banana and ramen noodle diet for these founders for severals months for sure, until they get the VC funding that they’re expecting. What I don’t get is, the Ycombinator partners are millionaires already, and they have already had several exists. Instead of expecting the VCs to top off the investment, why don’t they reach their own pockets and re-invest some of the money they got from their previous exists? Maybe they could fill in that 200-500 range gap, at least for their own “ycubated startups” ?

And when it comes to complaining about the non-existence of the new Googles of the world, you’d expect some world-changing ideas that they invested in. I didn’t see a single one. One would really expect some bolder investments when someone makes such a statement, if they are really believing in what they are saying and if they’re not in it for the easy exit. Is there a high-technology startup in YCombinator’s portfolio? Maybe Parakey could have been one, but it got sold to Facebook before even it could see the light. It seems like most YCombinator startups don’t go beyond being a feature of a feature, waiting to be acquired by a company that doesn’t have the time to develop that feature. Auctomatic.. Reddit, Scribd… and many others…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator These sites were never meant to have a business model. The business model in them is the potential of an early exit. That’s it. So Ycombinator is acting more as a product incubator not as a business incubator, but it is expecting to get funded as a company and maybe some VCs are just not buying into it. After all, Paul Graham himself doesn’t seem to be buying into it either, otherwise, he sure would invest more than 10k if he knew they were going to turn into the next Google right?

To follow the meme:

Facebook, bu ambargo’dan Shock and Awe taktigi uygulayarak, bir anda cok hizli yayilarak ve de yabanci bir sirket olmasindan ve radar’in altinda gitmesinden dolayi kurtulmustu…. Ancak oyle gozukuyor ki, gectigimiz gunlerde Facebook aleyhinde yayinlanan yazilara bakarsak, Dogan Holding, simdi buyumesine izin verdigi canavar’a bir kere daha bakarak, sanirim bu canavardan korkuyor. Son zamanlarda yayinlanan butun haberler, Facebook’un kotu yanlarini one surer durumda. Facebook mukemmel bir sistem degil ve aciklari var, ama bu 180 derece donus Turkiye’deki medya gucunu bir kere daha analiz etmemizi gerektirdigini bence bize bir kere daha hatirlatiyor.

Son gunlerde sik sik rastladigim negatif haberlere ornek bir negatif haber:
http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/teknoloji/8688899.asp?gid=229&sz=53515

Ben ne beklerdim?
Dogan Holding’in daha etik ve daha demokratik habercilik yapmasini umardim. Ozellikle, Begum Dogan, bizler gibi Stanford’da okumus, Silikon Vadisi’nin mantigini sahsen gormus bir kisi olarak, Dogan Holding’in daha kaliteli urunler yaratmasini amac edinmesini, ve de ellerindeki enerjilerini dogru kanalize etmelerine etki etmesini beklerdim, onun disinda, sirket urunlerinin yani sira, ayni oranda, rakiplerinin urunlerinin de haberlerine yer vermeleri, Hurriyet ve Dogan holding’in daha yapici bir medya olmasini saglardi..

Update April 14th 2008: Bir de blogumda disclosure gerekiyor, Zurna.com sosyal networking sitesinin sahibiyim ben.

It’s about time companies figure out a sustainable strategy to edit user generated content, instead of trying to wash their hands clean by stating that the users are responsible.