I know it is late.  I’ve had a humongously amazing, yet busy week. (and I don’t normally talk like that)  I feel so thankful that I am finally really starting to become less shy with people in the NY Tech Community.  Everyone I am meeting has been wonderful.  Y’all are great people.  Just has to be said.

First Off- Surphace S4.  In some ways, it works a lot like Zemanta.  It will distribute your content across their servers, get similar articles and videos for you, and try finding similar stuff of your own to publish in a nice little box at the bottom of your blog.  It’s basically another way of pumping your content across a wider network.  Further, it has an analytics engine attached (unlike Zemanta), as well as a very easy way to customize the box.

One note: Surphace was acquired by AOL.  A question came up by an audience member “So are you part of AOL, how much of the content is theirs”- on the assumption that most bloggers don’t want to be fodder for only AOL or alternatively, only give out AOL’s content.  At the end of the day, as Dave McClure would say “The Internet Wants to Be Fuckin’ Paid,” and you don’t get paid by being AOL’s peon.  Apparently the answer is that they monitor the situation, since they are run independently.

I have but one question-Some topics are clearly more AOL-y than others (eg: a Celeb gossip site focusing on their fashion…since it is Award Season).  Since it never came up- although I would never ask for details, are they fairly distributing content despite blog type (IE, is this blog, which seems to somewhat be more focused on personas and tech, be more or less likely to get more independent content than our fake example of Celebrities and their fashion)  I have no idea without testing, and I didn’t sign up with the private code.  (I’m burning out here people).  Other questions here I ask can I integrate services like these into short form blogging?  As someone who is seriously trying out short form tumblogging on Tumblr for the first time (I’m trying to write enough to assemble a book on social media and dating*), the content there is meant to be seen in aggregate.  Same with a fashion blog, and many other blogs in these short-form blogs on both Posterous and Tumblr.  What exactly should something like S4 (and I would add Zemanta on some level) Link to?

Products like these raise some real questions about the needs of users as content producers.  I think it is worthwhile to watch this field and see what happens.  Since we don’t know what the future of content should look like, (cf ChatRoulette anyone?) it’s really hard to predict what the best, let alone better ways of distributing content should be.

Crowdfusion.  A really interesting idea. Bigass CRM in the Vein of What the Pros get custom built.  And now you get something equally as nice!  And get you get to customize it!  But the Word “Drupal” made it really hard to understand why not uhhh Drupal?  And why am I hearing this story?  Just tell me why I need this item.  Look I know you are an important guy in Tech land, and I respect that, but I want to know about the tech.  I had to go look at the TechCrunch video to find out it is a CRM that does everything (social, wiki-database, blogging).  I was just assuming this is the progression of tech (possibly).  It’s open source (that’s cool).  But still, although the story behind it was nice, please don’t do that.  Though I did like the story…  Still I really want to know from someone who understands Drupal better than me (I’ve never used it, and I’ve heard it has a significant learning curve, but that it is very powerful) why Crowdfusion over Drupal?

And as much as I really want to test both CrowdFusion and Drupal, I need a need (even a fake need) to test them with.  Just to give a fair analysis.  I am not sure when I could recommend one over the other, mostly because I am not familar enough with CRMs and the specific purposes behind each one, nor who should they be aimed at for each situation that they could be used with.  ’Nuff said.

No more blogging tools….for now

Bundle is a competitor to Mint.  Except with a larger data set.  And a “take” on the data set. It’s cool charts.  Very Cool charts.  I can now tell you that a Female, my age, living where I live, grossing $40,000-$50,000, largest expense is shopping: with somewhere between a half and a third going to shoes and clothing…

Here is my take on all of this: Dr. Robert Cialdini, who is the seminal researcher on how humans influence each other (or at least in the US), mentions that social pressure is one of the best ways to change people’s behavior.  Will showing people what other anymous people similar to them spen make a person want to kick anonymous’s spending butt- probably.  We already know it does from experimental energy saving programs across the country, where your utility company shows how much power you are using compared to your neighbors. (Yes I was the girl who had asked that question).

Unlike Energy, Bundle has the same business model as Mint (currently): they want to sell you better loans, etc.  And while I doubt they could fudge the data they bought and potentially could develop, since the scandals would rock them, they already are weaker when it comes to presentation data.  Right now I see bubbles floating across my scree, of various sizes, that are easy to compare to each other.  One of the critical things Mint did was made that data easy to understand visually (it’s a simple pie chart….)- the bubbles, which cool, are quite complex to guesstimate, especially once one digs down into the data.  If I had to look at the data and ask “where compared to this average girl my age in my area should I cut expenses” and compare bubbles, I would be more than a tad confused, because visual information parity isn’t easily understood. I don’t know why the bubbles are in the locations they are, the relative sizes they are, etc.

This is fiscally advantageous to someone selling a loan, not trying to save you money.  Just so you know.  Clarity comes from clear information and clear visual design, which this product falls short.

Granted, numbers and percents of items, especially items like money which can be infinitely divided, are extremely hard to create visualizations for, so congratulations for trying to keep the ball rolling.  For some, even pie chart to new pie chart is confusing.  Huge bonus points for at least realizing conceptually in large amounts of people’s heads, division is a problem.

Plus, without really clarifying these “charts” and “methods,” as someone in the tweet stream mentioned, is there a strong incentive to switch from Mint?  Or even get at the population that isn’t using the web to track expenses?  (I would say there are large chunks of my friends who aren’t Mint Users, and I am a bad one at that…)

Qliupso is weirdly interesting.  It’s an avatar environment, or a videocam environment, or an icon environment, in which you watch your videos in I guess private chatrooms with your friends.  Like a small group of friends, say three.  And while I see it having many uses (hello massive controlled virtual conference? Hello virtual Movie Night date where I actually see the guy? Stop thinking naughty things about a virtual date.  People have them.) I think the following things are really important to consider:

1) If you have videocam capabilities, why use the SecondLife style avatars?  It’s very gimmicky. Is it a speed up/down thing?  I’m just lost.  I rather see you do the happy dance if I had to cowatch a sports games with you than your avatar.  I mean, yeah cool tech, but I want to connect with you, not your avatar, once the technology is in place that I can see you.  Or to purposely misquote a male friend of mine “I want to videochat with you so I can hit on you.”^

2) You have an ugly unfriendly theme going for you that is 80’s video arcade. B’vakasha, Talk to the usability society in Israel, since I realize one of your cofounders there is based out of Israel.  They need the boost, and you need the boost, and then everyone will be happier.  A cleaner, less 80’s green neon with black version will allow you to penetrate to private webinar world and classroom world.

3) Stop being a windows special.  I’m not running Parallels (maybe I should already…)  Realize that with tech like this, you may as well make it portable,  Some of the most popular places to amuse oneself is while commuting on buses, trains, and airplanes.  I might as well make that time family-time.  Or hanging out time.  And that means stop thinking about computers as a big box, usually with windows, and instead moving towards the idea of computers as the many sized, many operating systems box.

4) Edit: After successfully downloading to my other machine, named Josiah,- I can’t use Facebook connect.  WTF?  Further problems include that Josiah is a netbook.  And like most products, you suffer the Netbook display problem.  Please buy a netbook and check the displays.  They’re tinier.  And not by a little.  By a lot.  So things you think are appearing on the page, are actually disappearing.  That hereby concludes testing early.

Venmo was by far an away the best demo I have seen.  It is also by far an away the best product I have seen.  By that I mean it is a scary product.  It will change the world as we know it.  I don’t talk that way about most products.  I tend to think I am slightly curmudgeonly (Bah You over there!!!).  Venmo will.  That is high praise from the curmudgeonly side of me.

This is extremely hard to comprehend, even for me.  Venmo is effectively another layer of banking, particularly if you think about the importance of M1.  They’ve attached a debit like system (that’s checking, aka still in M1) to cell phone numbers.  You pay by text message.  You can have an account, linked to an actual bank account.  And if it gets widely adopted, I doubt you would even need the separate account to exit the cash as dollar bills.  The website is basically a semi-moot feature there for management purposes, much like actual bank account websites exist for.  You could go though for your entire Venmo existence without seeing the website (though for responsibility reasons, I don’t recommend it…this product, as far as I can tell, is using real money in real ways, and you should treat your transactions there as carefully as you would your real life bank account.  Don’t say I didn’t tell you now.)

Furthermore, there is this idea known as trust.  If I trust someone, they can take money automatically from my account, whenever that entity wants to.  The one thing I don’t like about trust, now that I have sat there with it- I can’t put limits on my trust.  I can’t say person a has a $20 buck trust with me and starbucks has a $50 trust with me.  I would love to see some sense of limits, just because effectively it would be automatic billpay between friends and entities of all sorts whenever, however, I want if I could place limits (I mean I don’t want to trust my coffee place infinitely, mostly because I don’t trust me…)

Plus they email you with all of your transactions.

I’ve never seen anything more interesting in my entire life.  Considering that children can’t get bank accounts, and that you have 10 year olds walking around with cell phones, this is essentially the first real bridge step of banking digitally for whole groups of people who may not otherwise have access to the power of checking.  Plus with a few sets of tweaking, Trust really could radicalize how we understand credit and its demands, especially on the micro level.  It means a place where we negotiate and renegotiate credit as individuals with various other individuals and organizations.  That’s radical.  So radical my head is still spinning a little.  And very scary, for measuring trust in a banking sense has gotten really screwed up over the past 30 years.  (don’t believe me, believe Joseph Stiglitz who remarked in the mid-nineties about the shift from loans to bonds- “Banks versus Markets as Mechanisms for Allocating and Coordinating Investment.“)  I’m not sure what to think when I see Trust, does this mean I can open up bids for my credit independent of the banks, the way a larger coorporation can.  The possibilities, with this sort of product, are endless, because of how it de-ties the negotiating relationships away from the our large banking centers.  And that, is incredible…

No matter how much hype Square has, it can’t provide that level of monetary liquidity.  It still relies, at the end of the day, on leveraging the power of Visa and Mastercard.  And while Venmo could add credit cards to the system, it effectively bypasses the idea of old credit/debit cards, banking whatever.  Theoretically, your money never has to leave the Venmo system to use it.  That means your money is moving, and moving more rapidly.  And that, essentially, makes the definition of M1 much more complicated, and much more powerful.  Effectively, money at the M1 level is much more liquid, and hence now much more speedy in the system of finance.  Kudos to them for figuring this out.  I’m extremely impressed.  This is one of the most socially powerful pieces of technology I have seen.  Good luck, and godspeed, for this will change banking as we know it.

_____

The 1 minute shorts:

Filife:  This could be awesome.  It is crowdsourced questions and answers about your finances.  There is a premium service as well, where you get to crowdsourceyour answers to super-certified people who know stuff.  This however, does not help the fact that their CSS does not work in 4 different browsers.  That sucks.  And is silly.  And makes your website hard to navigate and is a very rookie mistake.  Does not make me want to click on the “Credit” Link.  OTOH, it is one of the few websites that seems to want to explain to the public in simple terms what a credit swap is.  And that is cool.  How many places on the web can you find that out, besides wikipedia.

Bellaga: This is Etsy for Emerging Fashion.  The clothing is beautiful, the site stunning, and the margins ??????.  Fashion is a notoriously cutting business.  The web can be very lightweight (It’s servers and serverload).  They really need to get on say the DailyCandy now, or some major fashion blog as the new it place to shop.  Or else.  If too many fashion brands go under while they are launching, the website may not have enough of a margin to continue running.  But it is a totally interesting revenue model for someone who likes clothing (and who saw how much someone my age pays for in clothing because of Bundle, so I know there is space for a site like this)  They definitely also need to get lots of people to sign up as emerging designers while they are, apprenticing, or in school, in say, FIT, or Parsons.  I know they only launched a week ago, but still, they need more clothing.  Because clothing is yummy and makes them seem more legit as a place to go to to see what is emerging (though they are featuring an extremely cutting edge look that I would kill to wear, and would look damn good in, if I say so myself, and not because I am vain, it is because it is the kind of clothing that would make me feel very confident…)

Also the site is disorganized right now.  There is definitely more clothing from the seller if you look around, but not a lot comes up when you search (like only one dress for cocktail, but the seller seems to actually be listing multiple??? Maybe it is a definition issue)  Please fix that, I like looking…

PinkDingo:  Essentially, they are on target about who gives to charities, and about the idea of Microgiving.  Now if only they could realize that you are mostly likely to give if you give via subscription.  And I think most people would do monthly subscriptions to charities. (Especially since they socialize the giving.) I wonder if they do charity suggestions (you like x charity, try y)  The charities listed are all in Guidestar. If that makes you feel better.

It needs a User experience Workover, only slightly.  It’s a little too light blue, I would like to see some contrast.  However, they are on their mark for older people, lots of big text.  One of the very few sites that realize you need lots of big text that I have seen (even if it is a dead ugly site).  Older people tend to donate more money, as they are wealthier than me, and older people are more likely to wear reading glasses, hence kudos on the big text.  Someone was smart there. Smart is also storing your credit card information as soon as possible. (Can we say we learned from the App store about seamless transactions).  They also have challenges and organization tools.  Still, it needs a hook.  I am not sure why I need this site, as opposed to knowing what charities I like?  Further, although I love the facebook hook-in, I almost want to leverage that hook more, since I know people spend way too much time on that site (including me…)  It’s not enough to publish to feed anymore, especially when your site is a little visually weak.  What is going to draw me into giving (Answer: the stories that make facebook a place to become a digital human, so my digital humanity wants to know why I am giving to this charity and spread that story to my friends….)

NeedAKick.  It’s based on a simple premise.  You pay the site designer (which again needs a makeover, it isn’t hook-y enough) if you fail to do your important task.

My imperial question: Is that enough? Or at least the best way- My foot doctor (I recently had a badly sprained ankle) likes to make you sign papers to make sure you remember when to come.  The system mostly work.  Dr. Robert Cialdini (there he is mentioned again) writes about influence: does negative influence, even on yourself, work?

Probably not.  Most people would still avoid the task, and lose the money.  So our frum yid* would make a good buck, oddly enough- I doubt he would help anyone though.  If it were a site where I paid to find people to help me prove that I could complete the task and to break it down into micropeices, that might work (that sort of exists already, though….)

^I have a weird sense of ironic humor.  And I like detournement…

*That is not insulting.  As they say in Chabad, a Yid is a Yid.

Actually it makes me want nothing.

I’m living in the age of over-advertisement.  It’s everywhere, and often misplaced.  My to be children, by the time they are 6, are more likely to know the cartoon character Ronald McDonald that to recongize the face of their current President.  And I’m not sure why.

What’s worse, is the lack of control I have over the spectacle of advertisements surrounding me, even though in theory, at least on the internet, they should be user generated.  I’ve been advertised Birth Control while looking on male friends and aquainatances.  My email thinks I will watch ESPN some days because I will write to and about startups (I don’t watch sports, and I never have).  When I visit a college campus, or talk to college friends, apparently because I am female, I should sell my eggs.  If a friend of mine is talking about her cousin’s wedding, apparently she needs bridal gear.

Meanwhile, no computer has yet to realize that I have picked out my aspirational pair of shoes.  (Oh come on…besides I would look good in really high shoes that are classy)  Part of the reason is: I don’t go looking for shoes on a daily basis.  I know what I want in shoes.  I do go looking at tech, and talk to friends, and all of these middle of the road sorts of behaviors on daily basis.  My aspirations is what I want to see. What I actually see, is nothing like that.  I want to see a world of food where the recipes come from Alice Waters toned down for a beginner to medium cook.  And copies of really nice, tasteful clothing. And Art listings  Not ESPN and lets pretend Shana is a teen Whore who likes to party (I don’t like to Party.  I like to have coffee and gelato with friends)

And here is the problem: I need to tell a computer what to do.  And I need to filter down.  And I need an easy way to do so, so I can easily tell advertisers to stop bothering me so much (and when they do, to only bother me with stuff I want to see).  And this all needs to be fairly seamless.  Right now, this is based on my browsing history.  I get the majority of my fashion not from browsing around (sorry).  I get my food recommendations from passing around small emails here and there, and small recipes written down on papers, with friends.  So how do I tell someone in this world, I am interested, wihtout telling them too much?  Without having to give up so much information?  That world is my private one, my aspirational one, and that is also the one I want to be advertised to and about. It’s the one where dreams are made of.

Suggestions welcome! (Yes I realize this is backwards…and examples here are examples.  There are  other categories…)

One note about this post: Disqus allows me to keep a heavy eye on you all.  I’m not out to have a politics here or politics there talk.  This is not a YAY ISREAL or a BOOO ISRAEL post.  My politics are my politics and they are shaped by my experiences and my beliefs.  If you want to discuss politely, that’s fine.  If you want to have a screaming match- get off this blog.  And pre-check your facts first.  I have no tolerance for people who don’t pre check in what can be a politically tense topic.  Also, if you want to discuss with me the politics of Aliya, first go read the Shemonah Esrei (The 18 benedictions) and Birkat Kohanim (the Priestly Blessing) in the oldest form you can find them- you’ll quickly realize I’m the wrong person to argue with…

OK then.  While originally I was going to post about ad targeting and how funnily bad it can be, instead, I’m going to post about a book put out recently by the Council of Foreign Relations that has large relevance to the venture community: Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle. Many words have already been poured about the state of the Israeli Start-up community (if you really want a heavy read on the subject, you can just pop over to Tech Aviv or Ouriel Ohayon’s place, though Read, Write, Web did a nice writeup recently.).

This is not that post.  I cannot claim expertise on the Israeli start-up community.  I can say, I lived in Israel during the 11 months preceding Disengagement on a Kibbutz, where I was studying in an Israeli Seminary with close ties with the Army.  It had a hesder like program for women, one of three in the entire country. (This stay doesn’t include the  few weeks of Pesach + March of the Living.  But I did mostly learn to tremp, hitchhike, like a native )

What I can do is the following- comment on the lack of the ties the Israeli Venture Community has with the American Jewish Community.  I don’t know why this is.  It is very confusing to me.  The book actively promotes that Israel has an immigrant community,however  the portrayal of Americans are neutral to none, beyond as people where funds are raised.  This is largely due to the fact that  Americans, among other English speaking communities (the “Anglos”), seem to have reistance to making Aliya (that includes you, South Africans!) This I know as someone who has had Aliya activists running after me when I was younger and sprier and studying as a seminary student (never call me that…) Americans don’t like making Aliya, because they have more stable jobs with more money in the US.  This is generally true of English speaking countries.  Yet being Jewish is actually cheaper in Israel, especially if you are somewhat actively Jewish.  Your kids pretty much turn out Jewish in Israel no matter what you do.  I mean, even if there is a saying in Tel Aviv that the best parties are on Shabbat, at least they know it is Shabbat. In the US, you have to pay mucho bucks for your child to understand what day is shabbat and how those calculations work.

Why is that?  I don’t know. There is a ton of money poured into getting Americans to make Aliya.  Namely in the form of Nefesh B’Nefesh.  Their web-pages are depressing.  Look at this one for Graphic Designer.  From this web-page, I would never guess Israel was one of the top technological communities in the world. Java?  What about…Ruby?  Why are none of the standard web design associations listed?  (Even funnier, there is no page for anything involving the web.  I could say I do SEO work- and Nefesh B’Nefesh would come up…blank.  There is nothing for programming- either general or web specific, which is why I had to use graphic design.  That’s what I call, humongously bad PR)

Why is it that you have to buy a separate whole book (or take it out from the library) to find out that you can join a start-up?  That is ummm, stupid.  Why is it that said book doesn’t even list ways for someone to join a start-up.  It is, after all, supposedly an awesome thing to do after graduation.  Up there with taking hikes in the Galilee, if you are going to go do the Making Aliya thing…  I mean this is a ridiculous way of saying: Hi, I’m a startup in Israel, I’m nice and friendly, and I would like to hire you.  Horrible PR.

Meanwhile, there is a known “thing” that Israelis tend to become Yeriedim as they become more successful, especially as their companies are sold.  (Mammon may be the king of the world…)  So management relocates to say the US, Europe; it creates new problems (and yes, Start Up Nation touches on this problem).  Meanwhile you have the American Jewish community and those who are Yeridim stuck here in the US with management talent.  What are they doing here?  Why aren’t they in Israel with the start-ups? Why aren’t they staying there?  And why aren’t you just attracting the people who want to be management in the first place to go make aliya (you know those people who want to be “associates”).  That way you can stop the management talent drain.

Further, even Ouriel Ohayon complains of Aesthetic problems in the start-up community.  This to me is funny, because it says that someone(s) in the Israeli Start-up community is not looking hard enough and is being lazy bums at developing talent (though I don’t think it is Ouriel’s problem to solve alone). It also means that the start-up community doesn’t know how to get its management in place to look for viable design.  In Treatment is an Israeli import which is commercially successful in the US on HBO.  It is also not the only Israeli art import that is commercial viable in the US (say Michal Rovner who is represented by Pace Wilderstein….Or even Mona Hatoum if you dare to be a tad dangerous when it comes to rightist polics, not that I’m on the right, and I happen to love her art)  And didn’t the MOMA have a famous Israeli designer Ron Arad over the summer???

So the Americans are stealing your good Aesthetic sensibilities.  Probably because what we really stole was the good management.  Good to know. Maybe you should fix the ways to get to us managers to come to you on a more permanent basis so you can’t complain anymore.  K?   Stop worrying about access to the Nasdaq (you have that now) and start worrying about a long lasting ecosystem (with management and the pretty stuff that we seem to be borrowing on the international art scene, and movie scene, and other scenes.)  Make sure you can keep “associates” around.  Apparently, yes, they are necessary.  even if they are, annoying… (I don’t want to be a suit either).

Fix the Aliaya site.  Because umm, I laugh right now.  It doesn’t make me want to make aliya.  It doesn’t make me want to do much of anything involving the Israeli startup scene.  Which is very weird.  You would think, with all the money poured into to me to be very Jewish, and my introductory activity in the American (particularly NY) startup scene- I would be a good fit.

And it isn’t just a me thing either.  There is a secret club at MIT to help Jewish students get jobs that dates back to the 1920s I believe (my dad would know more, he wears a brass rat, it started because there were periods in American history where there was anti-semitism in the hiring process…now it just deals with out of work Jewish people because they are out of work).  My college Hillel post jobs that deal with Jewish things involved, even if it is only peripherally Jewish: Working in an Israeli Startup would count (and you would like my Hillel, lot of thinkers there).  It’s very typical for Hillels to do that!!!  You could post Startup Jobs in every Hillel at an Engineering school across the country for Israeli Startups.  After all- you don’t have to pay rent money for the first year! (Sal Klita baby!)   I’m sure there are plenty of people who have been active in Hillels, or have gotten a modicum of Jewish education, that if you went to them, the government of my country will pay your rent money for a year and we will pay you a small salary with stock options (oooohhh) to go work in my startup people would go.  Or even we would love for you to come to help us start a business. (ooh) And you still don’t have to pay the rent!

Not until you get your acts together- I wouldn’t dare go.  And that means ummm, making it look like there are jobs available and incubators, and all the fun stuff we have in the US!  Seriously…just because I can get my To’ar Sheini (that’s a masters) for free, really helpful if you want to switch over to Comp Sci (though I would have to prepare in the US, those university standards are very tough, don’t you know), I don’t think that the Israeli Startup Scene will cut it at all.  Or something involving management.  I know in the US, we produce too many managers.  In Israel, you produce lots of mashups: but you are importing management.  Which may or may not stay.  What does this say about you?  Nothing amazing.  That I can say.  I can bully way too many people there, and I kind of don’t want to, because I want to be held accountable so I can learn.

That says something if you want talent to make aliya.  Just saying…

Go fix that!!!  Really, I would go if I knew what the hell was going on in Israel in a realistic sense….and I felt like it could be a huge learning experience (this would be after ulpan, my hebrew has gone to crap).  Seriously Go Fix your recruiting for your own benefit and stop complaining…

(If you really want to fix that, seriously, You can petition ideas below by Feburary 15th for the Presentense Fellowship.  If we can come together with some good ideas, I can go to J-town as your representative, and get $30,000 and 1 year to implement, which is a lot better than having no publicity in the world of Aliya as an option.  It’s best to say I have sponsors for something this silly yet this massive.  And it is silly.  You need the publicity and the worker bees. And closer American Ties can’t hurt anyone statically, having been one of the few lay people who have seen both the AviChai Foundation numbers about Israelis and the NJPS numbers about Americans.  Sucktatic!  Though the Israelis are ahead.*

That, and you can hire one of my very early ex’s from my yar in Israel, who did make Aliya, Eitan Marks for an internship at a startup.  He’s studying Graphic Design at Bezalel, is pretty organized, draws well, and is an overall Nice Dati Guy who likes interesting movies, the bible,  and wears glasses and an ugly hat that he got from the army.  It will be good for him, trust me!)

*My hobby is to keep track of Judaism on the internet.  It’s a very interesting hobby, it tells you a lot about how culture and religion change when interacting with media and how media changes people and their practices.  Now I just need to get that unpublished  thesis about the growth of Post-orthodoxy during the 00s.  Should be an interesting read.

PS that’s a picture of what Jerusalem really looks like- It’s the Jerusalem Book Fair!!  Woot for book fairs!  Why can’t New York have one, they’re so much fun.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Israeli Hi-tech Office – a Great Place to Get Married! (israeltech.net)
• Start-Up Nation – a great read. (the-accelerator.blogspot.com)
• Lively start-up culture keeps Israel thriving (cnn.com)
• We Are The Startup Nation (techaviv.com)

I’m not sure what to say right now.  Though the AVC People list is here. (now you can’t complain, it is at the top of the post.)

Originally I had started this list many moons ago because Fred Wilson told me that I should follow the people on AVC.com in order to learn more about the world.

I originally was using Disqus, I found that experience semi-unsatisfying.  It was doable, but all the comments seemed out of context.  So I ended up stalking the user base on twitter.

Then the KidMecury outed me one day.  That was embarrassing.  Not soon after, Erik Schwartz asked if there was a twitter list available of regular commentators.

Thus, my personal ambition of just being quiet and going on my way was sort of crushed.  The List kind of had to get bigger.  My original intent was to just get all the people who had commented 10 times per month. I figured they were definitely reading and not just popping in this one time, never to be seen again.  I wanted to look for those who were engaged, and then make them more engaged.  This was extremely hard to figure out.  Some people just pop in occasionally.  Some people post an occasional comment here and there, and I wasn’t sure where they were primarily associated with.  And some people hid their twitter or just didn’t have (and still do). I’m still not sure of who everyone is (Though Hi! if you are missing can you tell me?)

I needed help so I asked and became a pain in the neck.

The post announcing the list has a huge amount of unique comments.  A number included people who hadn’t commented before; who feel like “All I can say is Yes” or who read through Rss feeds, who feel like if they comment they are late to the conversation, and even a person who just likes stuff without telling anyone until now.

To those people: You have something valuable to say.  Maybe not all the time (and I probably talk to much, but I’ll admit publicly I’m actually, uh, competitive about comments.) Just find someone who you disagree with slightly.  Or maybe  say why you like something.

I wasn’t ever expecting to become a commentator with a massive amount of comments.  I wasn’t ever expecting to ever write a blog, or start talking about what I like from a UX/UI point of view.  This was not my imaginary life (actually I didn’t know what I wanted precisely, and I’m still working parts of that out.)

I did it because I found it engaging. Clearly the vast majority who read AVC.com find it engaging too.

Next question:  What now?

I’m not fully sure.  This is a very unique experiment in social media.

This list is now massively larger than it was before.  I have managed to get everyone in the comments so far.  How am I supposed to get those other missing people over time? (and I may eventually break the list down into two if it gets too heavy- there is a 500 person limit to lists I think.)  And what do those people want? (I like products, I like engaging people, and it’s a good question.)

Further, some new complications.  This is an over 200 person list, and that is before I add the people who are following the list, before I get to Listorious.  It’s a bit of a madhouse of a list.  I’m ok with this.  However from a sheer practical perspective, I don’t think many people have the tolerance for engaging in 200+ people at once even through a stream. Let’s face it, in person, I get intimidated by a crowd of 200 people.  I figure for some it is very similar in social media.

There has to be multiple uses for this list.  Don’t be afraid to engage people- but also don’t be afraid to cull down into your own little world if you find this all very intense.  This is a contact list, a question list, and answer list, a place where people tell the world little bits about their tiny corner of it.  And there are a large variety of folks, from crafters to hedge fund people (and this is not the time to make fun of hedge funds).  In some ways, it’s very diverse (though there is a definite lean towards men in their mid to late 30s involved in technology.)

In exchange- look out for each other and the list.  And find the people who aren’t engaged yet, and engage them.  Ask them why.  Really simple request.  I promise.  Just asking apparently makes people feel a lot better.  Yes, people want to know what you are thinking.

Also- piece of advice: Go back to the original intent of the list.  I only created it because I wanted to learn more via other people.  Contact people with questions, comments, and see if you learn something new.

(Just remember this does expose you a little, if you feel uncomfortable about exposing parts of your life, or being exposed to other people’s- you should also ask to not be part of this.)

One last thought:

AVC.com has it’s own twitter id.  It’s now attached to the list.  So yes, the posts will appear too, along with each other.

Have fun!

PS If you have advice, you might want to throw in a word or two.  This is new even for me.

Even though I don’t really care one way or another about whether I’m blogging about what everyone else is blogging about, after seeing pictures and having to deal with weeks of (over)-hype:

With all due respect to the Blogosphere, Mr. Steve Jobs, and Apple Inc., that IPad looks like it has serious flaws that are going to damage it long term in market.

It looks like a cross between the IPhone and the ITouch, and has a similar user interface.  While it will help Apple short term, long term, it will hurt them.

There are two giveaways of what will cause radical change in tablet design in the presentation:

One: If this device is so great and portable, why would I need a docking base with a keyboard, particularly for it’s size and the billing that it’s a device that allows me to break away from such unnecessary extras?  This is, after all, supposed to be the super-portable machine.

Two: As part of the whole demo,  Brushes for IPad was showcased.  It essentially looks like a very lightweight copy of Adobe Photoshop.  One of the interesting choices they decided to do was to show off different brushes in the program and how a person can in fact draw (and draw well, there were copies of Picasso).  While it is extremely true you can draw with your fingers (and I highly recommend it), this again highlights a unique problem of the IPad.  If it weren’t an issue about portability and cost, the Wacom Cintiq 21UX plus Photoshop allows for much finer grained control of the exact same task (because it is a pen) with an equally crisp screen.*

Considering the weight, form factor, and the physical dimensions, I actually can imagine someone lugging the IPad around.  Right now, the IPad complies with IPhone/IPod Touch apps and watches movies with you and browses the web with you.  At its current size, it can be taken to task to do more than just broadcast information (something that the IPhone has been critiqued for, that users use information more than they produce it).

Considering that there are already some apps that fulfill business needs (including small businesses) and individual needs (such as the few available to Doctors), the idea that the IPad would become popular because it is super-portable is not a large stretch. However, any hint of a large market is not going to happen without better input for marking up and producing all sorts of documents and objects that all sorts of people produce.  When people talk about the imaginary world of content production, it is probably incorrect to think of them in the Web 2.0 pyramid (a hattip to Andrew Chen for starting to point out the usefulness of the Bartle Square of MMO player types as how we interact in digital enviroments.)  Even though the Bartle Square is still wrong, it is useful to know that in fact the Bartle Square points out that we don’t consume blindly, and we interact in a wide environment with a wide variety of needs.  The IPad needs to quickly deal with your Aunt Martha’s pictures, while you scan the headlines to make sure that new ordinance isn’t based in your town before heading to work where you will write up some documents based on some shared spreadsheets.  And you may work for a small business too which is going to be affected by said ordinance, so you really need to know for that report and spreadsheet. (which means your Aunt Martha will just have to get a cheap Birthday Gift, I’m sorry.)  Just because that comment isn’t appearing on Twitter, Facebook, a blog, or a comment doesn’t mean it doesn’t have ripple effects on a wider world and that a large community of people are not doing all sorts of activities (including creative activities) because of what is in the public sphere.

The idea that the dock with the keyboard is unnecessary is not the problem. (It’s not, how are you going to use the thing comfortably when it is in a dock of some sort?)  The idea that one should buy a multi-thousand dollar special screen to draw on is silly.  It is that when push comes to shove, will there be a lot of input on that screen when one has to hold it one handed and type on a touchscreen, even if there are subsets and custom/semi-custom screens?  Will people take the IPad to task for their everyday lives as Nurses, Teachers, Electrical Engineers, Accountants, Waiters, Programmers, Designers, IT people, Chefs, Seamstresses, Professors, Vinters, Construction Workers, Architects, Doctors,Bankers (even if the world hates them right now, they are still potential users), Paralegals, Secretaries, ect.  Or all we all just going to read magazines, play video games, and paint with them? (Not that there is anything wrong with that, just not starting at $499, I think $500 is too much, I bet  it could be done for $300 once they are produced en mass -this is scarily going to become a commodity item within the next 3-5 years once the design is done correctly.)

It is is this object, when everything is combined, fast and simple that the IPad will cause mass adoption on its own terms?  If you want to really test out this theory that right now the UI is impossible to grow more as something where one can be productive, I don’t think Apple can or will have any plans to hand them out en mass to their store employees (with say Square plus a custom app that logs purchases per employee), even though all of them carry around a kind of custom tablet computer with a custom OS already.  I bet you (nothing, I don’t have money), that they won’t.  The OS compared to the minimal form isn’t durable enough for people to work with.  There isn’t enough tool in the machine to imagine what can be done by the end user.

I vote down.

*I’m going to be taken to task about this.  Pen computing is extremely controversial, though I still think it is a dynamic and high growth field in the long term for a wide variety of industries.  The reason it is controversial is the following:

1. People interweave pointing and writing.  This creates problems when you need to have very fast word recognition. (hasn’t been solved yet)
2. Anti-aliasing between pixels has to be considered a norm, which it is slowly.  Pen movements are based on the edges, and if they are not smooth, it is harder to follow the pen. (partially solved, see Apple’s usage of font’s and Microsoft’s ClearType)
3. Most Digital Pens have x/y calibration error to the screen (called a parallax error, except it is not about any sort of visual forshortening).   It throws off how people want to point and draw because they can’t see properly where the tip of the pen is touching the screen versus where it is on the screen when the edge appears as a digital representation. (not solved last I checked.)
4. Everyone has real life preferences with regards to writing material (and I am using that vaguely on purpose. You also can only mimic, not give exact one to one feeling. EG: I actually have preferences when it comes to drawing material and papers because of the way I draw.  This is very typical. It is also the same reason why Office Depot sells a ton of different kinds of pens. (solvable, offer custom/semi-custom coatings for both the tablet and the pen.  I’m sure lots of people will buy lots of spare semi-custom pens that have a certain slick feeling to go with their “rough but delicately thin feeling paper” tablet.)

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So Loic Le Meur and Seesmic decided to release Look.

And being Shana-licious, I stuck it on a netbook to test.

As many people have commented, it is an extremely beautiful UI.  This doesn’t mean I am not going to nitpick at it.  The question is, Would I recommend this to my Ex, who recently registered for an account, is following 7 people, and as far as I know, never goes on Twitter.

No he’s on a Mac. (besides the point.)

Let’s pretend he wasn’t on a Mac.  He’s still pretty prototypical.  He’s following a few people he knows, and some other corporately stuff.  He’s never tweeted out.  He’s pretty typical as far as twitter users go, Despite what the rest of us keep telling ourselves  I’m not sure if he knows what he would say (I should ask, among many other questions).  Would this interest him?

From what I can tell that answer is probably (if it were on a Mac….)

It’s an extremely clean and simple UI.  It just sort of scrolls in front of you.  The lettering and pictures are very clean.  The one thing I dislike about the whole UI actually is that the last choice of letter colors seems to blend into the bottom of the screen, making it hard to read or even know if there are further choices.

Another nitpick element for me is that I was running on the XP Remix for a netbook.  It’s really clear this is for Windows 7 with a touchscreen, you are supposed to scroll with your hands.  That may be great in theory, in practice, it is a little difficult to fully understand how to switch off on a netbook without a mouse.  The response was slow, and sometimes mouse commands were ehhhh.  That might be Josiah’s the netbook’s fault though. Based on the look, I would actually stick this on a slow box, (or even the Boxee box as the screen saver), and have it try to compensate speed as well as try to compensate for the multiple input problem.

Speaking of that look- one of the most intriguing features were how the backgrounds changed.  It took me a while to realize this, but what was happening was look imports the backgrounds from twitter and puts a glassy, shadowy overlay on them.  And it looks amazing.  I have to congratulate you on making a way for a webpage served up in an unusual way.  The coloring is beautiful, and in most cases it makes the navigation easier to read.  However, it can create problems if the the colors of the background are the same shades as the text.  And there is no way to predict in advance.  Buyer beware.  You may end up looking at a twitter page and not being able to figure out how to get back.  That needs to be changed somehow in newer releases.

A further conceptual question for me is, does my ex care about Woot.  Or Gary Vaynerchuck. or a whole slew of things offered on Look.  (I’m not telling, I actually could call him and find out, we’re on pretty good terms).  It becomes a huge question, since it looked to me that there was overlap between these lifestyle areas versus the branded areas.  Why isn’t the CME Group’s curated page part of the “brands and skins” page, and instead part of the “money” page?  These really should be more closely integrated, especially from a marketing perspective.

From a marketing perspective as well, these pages actually have to be even more closely curated than they are now (although the cute little techie in me says,non-exitent pigtails and all, good job on the beta!)  Having grown up in a highly gendered environment and seeing these arguments play out on the Internet about how we gender female techies and male techies, versus say as Chris Dixon goes “the normals” I see the world as a far more complex situation than I think I should allow myself.  It might be worth it to put people through a short survey to get them set up on the “suggested” lists to look at as well as to see what kind of marketing they are suggestible to.  It doesn’t bother me to say that I am never going to look at a RedBull page, and I see that as sort of Frat Guy-ish (maybe because the Frat Guys I know, who are awfully nice, kept hosting sponsored parties…)  I probably would be more welcome to a page about, Christian Louboutin and the CME Group and Tech.  And it is worth figuring out and offering up different segments, if you plan on going on this path.  As for my ex, that’s his business.

Keeping these two groups sort of seperate (fashion versus branding) makes the  idea of how to track and follow this information for both groups of people (user versus producer) complicated.  Mix it up people.

In a totally unrelated note: Because of the way the UI is set up, you really could use it as a sort of monitor device for CRM.  You would need to alter it slightly to be allowed to dig deeper, but the essential idea of having a wide spectrum of one channel on what looks like a big screen flow in front of you seems like a much more useful way of looking at the world than the multipronged approach.  Much less distracting.  It looks like a stock-ticker or something, where often you don’t need to see everything until you need to do research.   The stock ticker of CRM.  Now that sounds nice.

Have a good Sunday!

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Bleh.  I hate when these sorts of things happen.

This is one of those products which makes me so sad.  It actually could be a really useful product.

As soon as I saw it, I realized why college is so depressing when it comes to research.  it’s because no matter what you do, the stuff out there, sucks.

Part of this is problems involving different fields of research: While generally, pretty much everyone cites one of two ways (MLA or Chicago), especially on the undergraduate level*, if one ever decided to go look up the amount of ways to cite primary and secondary material in say, The Chicago Manual of Style, one would know that just a paper is never enough when it comes to citing.  From there, there are four ways to stick your cites into your paper. Then you have to deal with different kinds of material.  It’s why the Chicago Manual, 15th edition, aka the orange brick, has two chapters on the subject.  Citing a Musical Score is not the same as citing a paper from Nature.  Depending on the length of your paper, of course…

Now trying to gather and manage all this stuff is a pain.  Across different disciplines, forget about it.  Someone like me, actually might be citing all of this.  Or trying to.  Or managing all of this information (Major students in my department have been told to read everything from hard core bio textbook to look up articles about how charts good charts are made for their theses.  I realize that if I want to get really good at art, I would need to graduate, get a job, and study…math, statistics, and comp sci because of the kind of art I’m interested in….whereas other people I know would be studying totally different material….)

I actually had Mendely installed (because I tried to register for everything Le Web ‘09 offered that was explained in English).  I’m part of their prime demographic (I’m a student on leave doing a bachelor’s thesis work in Art, and I am expected to defend a thesis of artwork through actual research.  That’s pretty normal where I’m from due to class schedules versus requirements.)

I realized I couldn’t figure how to make the damn program work; How was I supposed to organize books that weren’t there, papers in the process of being written, movies that need to be annonated, and artwork that needs to be relooked at (if I am so lucky)?  Before sticking in my own stuff.  Delicious actually does a better job for me right now, for the most part.

That just annoyed me.  I realized it wasn’t going to be a me thing either: How would someone import their lab notes (primary research) or other sorts of primary documents, particuarly rare ones?  And then share them?  Primary documents are everything when doing research: how else are you going to check that what you are doing is the right thing?

Those lack are a total fail.  If your layout can’t make clear what is going on within 5 minutes, students will ignore you.  I also can’t beleive I de-installed.  I’m tempted to re-install to figure out what happened, but that may be a waste of my time.  I have reading to do, you know…

(I never de-install, I mean I never de-install.  And therefore, I’m sad.)

Sorry guys.

*In case you are curious, I cite Chicago.  This means I’m an intellectual snob.  Actually, the real reason is I went there.  And if you like the photo, it is from one of my favorite Hangouts on Campus, the Regenstein Library. (Go A-Level!)  Someone actually is documenting all the grafitti there, some of which is quite awesome, because it is an awesome library.  Go take a look…(also here is her book)

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I was at an occasion last night.  There was a number of bloggers there.  They blog about a subject that I am interested in, one that has come up only once or twice on this blog.

I’m extremely glad I went to said occasion for a number reasons that cannot be discussed on said blog.  It’s going to create issues galore.  All that being said, it would be extremely smart for me to let down my brown curly hair and write about the subject (which is how these people probably came to be bloggers in the first place, though I cannot say, since I do not know what they think beyond this one time I met these people and what they write.)

Ben Atlas and I have had some very interesting discussions and pointed discussions publicly about the reasons behind anonymity on the web and whether it is a good thing or a bad thing in general.  I’ve definitely gotten a lot less anonymous.  I definitely had a push to slowly be more myself in writing as myself.  In the short term, I can definitely say that has been good and has been a maturing experience.   However, and this is a big however, because I’m living in public, I can’t write and discuss certain topics that weigh heavily on my mind the way I should be.  I’d like to think that like most people, I am a multifaceted person.  The internet may force me to become much more focused on one facet.  Or maybe that is because I’m vain .

I need some space to think about the other stuff, and where should that be?

I can tell you one thing- not here.  Not the place.  This place is fairly souped up.  It has semantic tags courtsey of Zemanta.  (Has anyone tried to purposely crack down and do a badly tagged semantic tag through say poor tagging in Delicious?)  It makes sense to discuss my fairly too souped up life with my fairly too souped up group of ‘net tribe friends.  (and yes, we are all way too souped up on tech in a crack cocaine kind of way )

Further, I actually look out for the tech that this group of bloggers is using (yes I was watching said guy in the corner pull out his blackberry and not his Iphone, Yes I saw that,and yes I made my mental note of that.  Because Mary Meeker wants to called RIMM asses on my watch.)

So further, I want to discuss stuff with those people.  Tech and society and art is not what I want to discuss.  Other aspects of my life is.  And I want that in private.

It’s not going to work here.  I may need to break the blog into parts where there is a second private blog hosted elsewhere.  In private and anonymously.  So I can do some venting.  Downgrading tech has its advantages to freedom, you know.  I just need to think about if I am going to do that or not.

A message to the different y’alls:

Because I know a number of different sorts of people (and that is a good thing, may we all know a number of different sorts of people, it’s a very good thing to have lots of people to make you think, and I am very thankful to know many types of people.), I am not totally sure who is reading this.  I am not totally sure of the reactions of those who read this.

Further, for those who care: The commenting system on this blog logs your comments in two different places, once locally on my server, and once elsewhere, with Disqus, since effectively the comments are a form of social networking as well.

There is a lot of power in those comments which deserve a post in and of itself.

However, it does mean that if you leave a comment, even if you leave it as Anonymous, (and that option is there) or leave it under a nickname that is unregistered, a bunch of things will happen:

1. I can see your IP address.
2. That comment will be added to the log of thousands? Millions? of socially networked comments on the main server.  if it is a new name, even it is unregistered, it will have its own site, and you can claim and manage the comments later.  There are pluses and minuses to doing so, but it also means that two nicknames can’t be used from one email address.  Don’t leave a comment under an email address, webpage, whatever, that you feel uncomfortable being traced from.  There are ways around it, namely toss-able email and Tor. But be aware that you are watched here more than usual, and that the web is clearly moving in this direction.  Something to think about.

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Normally I avoid the subject of freedom at all costs.

But the Google/China standoff has made it really important to say something, because I’m watching this in more bated breath than Haiti.

Most people, upon meeting me, don’t realize that I burn with certain questions, one of them being “What does it mean to be Free?”

I was very lucky to have a ridiculous amount of Internet access from the earliest age possible.  My father is a hardware nut, and my mother a programmer, so it was normal that I would get these sorts of things (cellphones they don’t get though…)  I was able to realize (being very retro here) that AskJeeves was better because it was a meta-searchengine, and that because search engines sucked, you should display results in 100s, not in 10s.  I also understood I could look up anything, including religion, sexuality, fanfiction, anything.  I understood this very early on.

It gave me the ability to look at the world with some more open eyes, even if I didn’t understand it (and still don’t), I was able to see that there was a broader world out there, and that I had and will always have choices.

Google made that process better.  It made the choices more apparent (around the same time I stopped reading fanfiction, for the most part).  Not everyone will use those choices wisely.  That’s not the point.  The point is, for those people who will: It will be life changing.  It is the difference of knowing there is someone out there who cares, who is your emotional and intellectual equal, who cares about the same issues as you, and then being able to connect.  It is the difference between learning a new fact that makes your argument and your person through the expansion of your intellectual abilities stronger.  And is knowing that the people you meet will slowly bolster you.  Losing that can kill people and can kill societies: or it can rebirth them.

I was talking with some people last night: A chunk of them blog and wanted to know if I read their blogs (I’ll come back to you in a bit)*, and I didn’t want to tell them that even though I can’t feel what they write right now (personal reasons), it’s adminrable that they do.  They were fighting a good fight from a niche community.  And they allowed their voices to be heard and to grow from it.

That may be what Google gives up if they leave China.  And it wouldn’t be for 7 people.  It would be for billions including millions of students, all of whom are like me on some practical level.  I know I know nothing of the world.  The only way to know is to put yourself out there.

Even so, Google is hacking back.  I’m not sure what I think about a huge company just peering inside other large companies and potentially large governments. Yes, I know their policy is “Do No Evil.”  However, to be free is to recognize that one is small and that I can come together with others for mutual benefits (usually to protect myself from harm) (This is Locke people, I accept Locke.) How does Google manage to protect my freedom without being, well, oppressive in some sort of utilitarian sense.  They have my information, and I wonder what could cause them to turn it over.  Right now, nothing.

I’m so sad when I watch this- I don’t know if there is anything I can do except watch and wait, and maybe want to cry a little.  I want freedom to win.  Freedom to be whatever I want to be.  Freedom for everyone to be what they want to be: and that requires information to flow.

I wish someone would translate this into Chinese: If you are in China and can see this: The thing that unites you is that you are all a little different, that in fact is normal.  It is the ability to find out together what those differences are and then to repsect them: That is what makes the Empire strong.  I wish those my own age so much luck in all of this, because I know that this one of those defining expeirneces that will affect you for the rest of your lives.  May you rise above it and change societies and governments for the better because of it.  May you bring some sense of liberty and Joy, a sense of better understanding of who you are as individuals, and therefore what China and the Chinese people are, as you scale the wall.  Good Luck!

*You get your own post.

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