gdp's Comments

Wonkette : Jon Huntsman Surprised By GOP Candidates All Being Insane Idiots

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 04:00:46 +0000

Huntsman's "strategy" of pretending to be the sane one in a field of lunatics is likely to place him dead last in fundraising. The "centrists" will vote for Obama and Perry and Bachmann will duke it out for the nominations. I'm guessing Bachmann will take the Iowa caucuses, Romney will take New Hampshire if he hasn't run out of money, and Perry will take the nomination. I like Huntsman but he's going to lose. He'll probably have to drop out before the end of the year. It's about fundraising, and Perry has a clear advantage.

Dan Alpert's Two Cents : On the S&P Downgrade of the United States of America

Sun, 7 Aug 2011 01:08:31 +0000

S&P is a *business* ... it *sells* its opinions to anyone who is a qualified buyer. You can think of their downgrade as "content marketing" - a "white paper" designed to bring traffic to their web site and into their sales funnel. What's worse is that S&P did not do any original work or analysis. They simply are taking the more or less unbiased efforts of the Congressional Budget Office and warping *their* hard work in the service of the people who pay their salaries into a propaganda piece. It sucks even worse than you say it does when you look at it that way.

DMA Email Marketing Council Blog : What Can Classical Music Teach us about Email Marketing?

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 19:24:56 +0000

I hate to say this, but of all the wonderful works your genius Elgar produced, "Dream of Gerontius" *is* boring! ;-)

KATU - Portland, OR : Oregon Zoo to put cougar cub on exhibit this week | KATU.com - Portland News, Sports, Traffic Weathe

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 21:47:17 +0000

I had a Siamese cat once - called her a Couch Cougar ;-) But aren't baby cougars usually called "kittens", not cubs? ;-)

GFBC News Network : Why Google is not feeling lucky and the recession has not missed them

Wed, 7 Jul 2010 21:09:41 +0000

Google can't "dominate" any more simply because they're subject to regulatory pressures in Europe and Canada, and most likely will at least have to deal with anti-trust issues in the USA. They may not lose any battles in the USA, but it's a cost and a drain on their growth. Google is going to have to make some hard strategic choices. That means *killing* non-performing projects and *firing* people. They seem reluctant to do that.

TechCrunch : Disney/Pixar Buys The First Twitter Trending Topic Ad

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 02:43:26 +0000

Do you seriously expect the movie to be shit? It might be disappointing to some, but it's highly unlikely to be utter garbage!

TechCrunch : Disney/Pixar Buys The First Twitter Trending Topic Ad

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 02:41:59 +0000

Remember - not only does DisneyPixar get a "Promoted Trend", they also get Promoted Tweets *and* Twitter's analytics!

TechCrunch : Twitter Analytics No Longer An Afterthought With Smallthought Buy

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 18:46:34 +0000

Twitter is going to have to do *much* better than "Trendly" if they want to compete in analytics.

TechCrunch : Yahoo Goes All In With Facebook: Here Are The Screenshots

Sun, 6 Jun 2010 20:41:19 +0000

Oh crap! I just deleted my Facebook account - do I have to delete my Yahoo! account too?

Feld Thoughts : Google I/O Panel on VCs Who Code

Sun, 6 Jun 2010 20:27:06 +0000

I've never met "great people" who developed shitty products or who gave shitty service. But I've seen a lot of great products languish and die simply because they were outsold by adequate ones. ;-)

Feld Thoughts : Google I/O Panel on VCs Who Code

Sun, 6 Jun 2010 19:16:35 +0000

I still code every day, and will stop when they pry my cold dead fingers off the keyboard! But I have to tell you - if I ever ran into a VC who admitted that they still code, I'd run out of the room. A VC's job is to deliver a superior reward-to-risk ratio to his / her investors, and that's really not about technologies but about people - who is going to sell what to whom.

TechCrunch : Did Amazon Miss The Boat On Social Commerce?

Mon, 31 May 2010 06:55:49 +0000

Amazon was doing social before it was called "social". There's no "boat" to miss! Is Amazon vulnerable? Sure - they don't have a clear "local / mobile / games" offering. You can't (as far as I know) make a restaurant reservation on Amazon. You can't buy groceries on Amazon. But reviews? Collaborative filtering? Recommender systems? Social graph? Friends and connections? They've had that for years!

SmartBlog On Social Media : What will it take to make Twitter great?

Fri, 9 Apr 2010 18:45:32 +0000

Are you going to be at Chirp? In what capacity? As a *participant*? A *contributor*? Or someone sitting in the bleachers watching? Fred Wilson, at least, is a participant in the Twitter ecosystem. He has invested his clients' money - and possibly some of his own - in Twitter. He sits on the board. And I believe he will be at Chirp, or at least his company will be represented. I too will be at Chirp as a participant. And I will come away either energized or discouraged. I can't really say which, because Wilson is right - the Twitter ecosystem *is* at an inflection point. It may go its way without me. But I'm planning to be there. Will I see you? My recent post The ‘глупо муравей’ story: Shostakovich, musique concrète, Wikipedia, bullshit and curation

SmartBlog On Social Media : Should social-media data be used for research?

Tue, 6 Apr 2010 18:36:57 +0000

Facebook should have shut Pete Warden down as soon as they found out what he was doing. He wasn't up front with them about *what* he was doing, *why* he was doing it, and what was in it for *Facebook* or Facebook's customers! Instead, he just went ahead and scraped data. He's lucky he didn't get sued - or worse! At least he's starting to get the message. He came on the Twitter API Developers' Google Group a few weeks ago and told the group what he wanted to do. He was told that it was a violation of Twitter's TOS. Here's the link: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-developmen... Marketers - *listen* - there's an old saying that it's better to ask forgiveness than permission. *Erase* that notion from your strategy! My recent post The ‘глупо муравей’ story: Shostakovich, musique concrète, Wikipedia, bullshit and curation

Borasky Research Journal : What Would You Pay A Month For A Twitter Account?

Fri, 2 Apr 2010 19:01:28 +0000

Strictly speaking, the Van Westendorp model does not apply to an existing service, and question four: "At what subscription price, in US dollars per month, would you consider Twitter to be priced so low that you would feel the quality couldn’t be very good?" is not valid, since millions of people are not suspicious of Twitter's quality at a price of zero. But there are ways around this, and once I get a large enough sample, assuming I do, I'll be posting the analysis. I have gotten enough responses to show that people are seriously thinking about the economic value they are getting from Twitter.

Borasky Research Journal : Three Must-Have Books on Data Visualization

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 19:42:14 +0000

Yeah - I\\\'ve been a big GGobi fan for a long time - just started playing with Mondrian, though.

Borasky Research Journal : A Visual History Of Twitter's Growth

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 17:12:01 +0000

You're asking me to write another blog post, aren't you? ;-) But seriously, what people pay attention to for a first approximation is growth and market share, measured in dollars per unit time and dollars, respectively. What we get externally from most tools, like Compete.com and from my samplings, are raw Internet metrics.

Borasky Research Journal : Seeker Or Seller: What Do You Think About Adding Popularity To Twitter Search?

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 09:48:07 +0000

I understand why the developers are upset - they're absolutely right about not wanting the API vibrating under their feet while they're trying to serve their customers. But I'm more interested in the changes to search itself as perceived by the two classes of search users - seekers and sellers. The monitoring services *should* be migrating to Streaming. The ones with established business partnerships with Twitter have for the most part already migrated, and I wouldn't expect them to be vocal on the open Google Group if they hadn't. So what's your opinion as a *user* of Twitter Search? I agree - they do need to define "popularity", but I'm not a heavy Search user. The only two major use cases I have for Search are for gathering historical data about an event. I'm not sure how the changes are going to affect those cases - I think my code will simply ignore new key-value pairs in the returned objects, so the code will only break if key-value pairs that I am using disappear.

Borasky Research Journal : Seeker Or Seller: What Do You Think About Adding Popularity To Twitter Search?

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 07:02:36 +0000

That's a nice page!! How are you accessing Twitter - via Search or Streaming?

Borasky Research Journal : Seeker Or Seller: What Do You Think About Adding Popularity To Twitter Search?

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 20:53:19 +0000

Most of the discussion on the Twitter Developers' Google Group seems to be about how inconvenient the change is to developers. I want to know how search users feel about it!