Coyote Blog

A decade ago, I was an executive at an Internet startup named Mercata.  Mercata was one of a couple of entrants in a field we had named "group buying."   In practice, this meant there were limited time sales where the price of a product would fall based on the number of people who agreed to buy.   Obviously the volumes were not large enough to get economies of scale of any sort, so they main advantage of the approach was viral marketing -- once you had agreed to buy, you had an incentive to get others to join in as more buyers would reduce your price.

The company eventually folded.  The company was very professionally run for an Internet startup of the day, but it had a lot of overhead for its volume, and, as eBay would learn, a lot of people wanted to buy immediately rather than wait for some sort of auction to play out.

But it turns out that one of our biggest failures was timing.  Recently, a company called Groupon has taken advantage of social networking that did not exist 10 years ago and has been quite succesful building a business using a very similar model to Mercata's.  It appears that Google has just bought Groupon for $2.5 billion.  Sigh.

This is not, however, even my largest financial missed opportunity.  I still have in my desk a 1984 job offer from Microsoft, which I eschewed at the time because it paid less than my other offers and tried to compensate me in these crazy pieces of paper called "options."  I once calculated the current value of the options just in the offer letter (ie not including any future grants over time) and their value was well north of any conceivable net worth I might reach currently.

I have nothing to add to this takedown, but in case you have not seen it you should really this.  A printed magazine called Cooks Source took an online article written by an author (Monica Gaudio) without the author's permission or any payment.  When the author complained and asked for a small bit of compensation (in the form of a donation to the Columbia Journalism School, lol), the magazine editor fired off this amazing email to the author whose work she stole:

Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was "my bad" indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things.
But honestly Monica, the web is considered "public domain" and you should be happy we just didn't "lift" your whole article and put someone else's name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me"¦ ALWAYS for free!"

For Monica Gaudio, this must have been a bit like the person who stole your car calling you to complain that the car needed to be washed.  Incredibly, the editor then proceeded to dig the hole even deeper.

His response to a commenter should not be missed.  An excerpt:

Let's move on. I'm going to get a bit more critical now, so prepare yourself. Let's start with this:

What a sniveling little shit of a post from a sniveling little shit of a man.

This really feels lazy to me. You can do better. "Sniveling little shit" is already overused to the point of cliche. It is evocative, so I probably could still have lived with it had you only used it once. But to use it twice, and in the same sentence, really left me wishing you had come up with something more creative. Perhaps you were using repetition as a rhetorical device, but it really reads as if you just got tired of coming up with colorful ways to express your contempt for me. Which is disappointing, because those first couple lines really had me wanting to believe that you hated me. If I could offer a suggestion: This might be a good time to return to the puss-oozing lesion metaphor. I think it serves you well in a couple ways: It vividly and luridly conveys your disgust for me, and it links me in the minds of your readers to something quite unpleasant"”a festering wound. And a call-back is always a good way to keep your audience on its toes. You might even add some extra ickiness the second time around. For example, you might set the sore on someone's genitals, or perhaps on an anus. That's the beauty of writing! You are in control!

I am heading for Italy for two weeks.  No blogging planned except perhaps some photo-blogging.  I expect you guys to have this country straightened out by the time I get back.

Patrick at Popehat observes how a media outlet probably missed the fact that they were hearing sarcasm.  But there is a very good explanation of why sarcasm does not work on the web.  Think of a couple of sarcastic comments, like "Boy that Joe Arpaio is sure a friend of civil rights" or "wow, that Cynthia McKinney is one sharp legislator."  The problem is that on the web, there are likely any number of people arguing, quite seriously, that Arpaio is the greatest friend the Constitution ever had or that McKinney is a bastion of well-reasoned, sober deliberation.  We are getting to the day that without regularly reading an author on the web, it is virtually impossible to be sure a given remark is sarcasm.  I mean, if I didn't know where he stood politically, I would have initially pegged Kevin Drum's assertion that Tip O'Neil cut a deal to have poor people pay the taxes of rich people as some sort of clever joke.

I find all the angst over evolution of the Internet in articles like this one in Wired to be pretty funny.  It used to be that nostalgic conservatism longed for days 40,50, even 100 years ago.  Now apparently in high tech, nostalgia is for the good old days five years ago, in this case before iPhones, YouTube, and Facebook.   Yawn.

We all know Conservatives are supposed to be conservative, but I have written a number of times about the enormous conservatism of self-styled progressives.   I suppose its a human trait that at some point in time, say in their teens or twenties, people psychologically define the world to be "normal," after which change is disconcerting.  I am not sure I have ever felt that way, so I am only guessing and trying to read between the lines of others' comments.

The only reason I followed the link to the Wired article at all is that I saw this terrible graph reproduced:

I mean, its pretty, but implies that email and web browsing are going to zero, which is absurd.  In fact, my guess is that they continue to grow, but shrink as a percentage because of the growth of new uses, which are disproportionately bandwidth-heavy so skew the chart.  And by the way, is anyone but a few hardcore geeks sitting around lamenting the decline of FTP and newsgroups, which died about 5 seconds after there was a more efficient way to download porn.  Is Facebook really anything but a much more capable substitute for newsgroups and chat rooms?

Everyone else may know about this feature, but I wrote an email today where I was going to attach some tax documents for my accountant.  The email said something like "see attached..." but I forgot to attach the files before I hit "send."  Gmail popped up a message that said something like "you had 'see attached' in your text but did not attach a file, did you mean to?"  Why, thanks.

To:  David DeWitt (Press Secretary)

I am always happy to see more libertarian candidates in our Congressional races, but in the year 2010 I just don't think there is an excuse for sending out a mass email for anything other than Viagra without an "unsubscribe" link. This is particularly true given that your campaign must be harvesting email addresses from a variety of sources rather than using an opt-in system, since up until today I had never even heard of Travis Irvine nor do I live in Ohio.  There are many services that provide automated mailings that take care of all the list management and unsubscribe mechanics.  Constant Contact has a very nice service.

Since your candidate is a libertarian and, I assume, familiar with the concept of rational self-interest, I will put my suggestion in those terms.  Without an "unsubscribe" link, I am forced to hit the "report spam" button in Gmail.  If enough people do the same, there is a good chance your candidate's email will not be getting through to anyone's email box, even those who are interested.

At a family reunion (my wife's side) all this week.  Joy.  May or may not get to blog.

Civ 5 is coming.

Yesterday I put a beta version of Swype on my Android phone.  Swype is the first really new data entry paradigm I have seen in years.  To type a word, one puts their finger on the first letter and then, without lifting the finger, moves the finger across all the other letters in the word.  The path below gets the word "quick"

The software figures out what you were trying to type, and it is right, at least in my case, a tremendous amount of the time.  One does not even have to be very accurate - I kind of missed some letters and it still figured out the right word.  Even got a bunch of proper names correct.  I know this seems odd, and its a concept that is best tried rather than explained, so I downloaded the beta on my android phone and tried it.  Amazingly, unlike the old Palm shorthand and other new handheld data entry experiments, this took about zero training to start using well. I have a physical keyboard on my Droid, so I still think I can do a bit faster on that but it is close.   Those with only the virtual keyboard should give this a try.

And smug iPhone users don't have it yet.

At Forbes.com.  Just what I needed, another deadline very week.

Haven't played with all the new features but the folders alone are worth the upgrade.  You will get it automatically in the next few weeks if you leave your wireless on, but if you are an impatient geek like me, you can download and update yourself here.

This weeks public service message - how to do CPR.

Hat tip the Frisky

A large part of Apple's iPad 3G sales pitch was the ability to buy a $30 a month unlimited data plan from AT&T.   In an announcement that clearly has been in the works long before Apple introduced the iPad, and which was only released after the first wave of iPad 3G sales, AT&T said "just kidding" to its unlimited data plan customers.  I understand where AT&T is going with this but if Apple is going to have an exclusive relationship with a cellular provider, it has some responsibility to its customers to keep them in line.

For years I have resisted the urge to switch to AT&T to get an iPhone, sticking with whatever imperfect phones I could find to access the Verizon network.  This just reinforces that choice.

Local telephone providers pretty much failed in their ability to offer reasonable high-speed data services to customers, for years losing out to cable and other suppliers.  It will be interesting to see if any cellular providers will be up to this challenge.  HT Megan McArdle.

Update: The old plans are still up at the Apple site selling iPads.  Note the new AT&T plan even cost increases the low volume plan, increasing it from $15 for 250mb to $15 for 200mb.  Crazy that Apple allowed their partner to do this within a month of the iPad 3G launch.

Actually a working version of Pac-Man (use arrow keys).

I found this new blog called Whiskey and Car Keys by accident -- I actually am working on a regular writing column and thought about this as a title for the column (from the PJ O'Rourke quote about giving power to government being like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boy).  Anyway, they ticked me off by grabbing a good name ahead of me, but I can't stay mad at a young group blog that seems to be focused on libertarian issues and burrito reviews.

From Steve Jobs of Apple

While Adobe's Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.

LOL.  Substitute "Apple" for "Adobe" and "i____" for "Flash" and the sentence still works fine.

Pursued two guilty pleasures this weekend:

1. Saw Kick Ass, despite Roger Ebert's plea that I should not.  Enjoyed it, though maybe it has been a bit over-hyped.  Mindy was the greatest -- in the credits my son checked out the actresses name.  He said he needed to know so he could marry her some day.
2. Played Just Cause 2.  A bit like Grand Theft Auto, but I never really liked the GTA franchise but enjoy this game.  Basically it is about blowing things up and killing people in a faraway land to create Chaos.  Very open-ended, with some nice travel dynamics, particularly with the grapple and parachute.

Spring skiing in Utah.  I may blog, I may not.

From a BBC poll:

Almost four in five people around the world believe that access to the internet is a fundamental right, a poll for the BBC World Service suggests.

The survey - of more than 27,000 adults across 26 countries - found strong support for net access on both sides of the digital divide.

Countries such as Finland and Estonia have already ruled that access is a human right for their citizens.

International bodies such as the UN are also pushing for universal net access.

So everyone who ever lived before about 1990 were denied a fundamental human right.  I would rewrite this study either as "80% of people have a silly definition of human rights" or probably more correctly "100% of BBC poll authors do not know how to write a good poll question."

If you are lonely and want to see your email box quickly fill up with messages from people you have never met, a great way to do that is to be interviewed on a national cable news show.  All of those who have written me, I am trying to get back to you all but I am a bit overwhelmed.

I have started a new blog because, you know, I don't have enough to do already.  To some extent this is a reaction to a lot of interest I am getting on the topic of recreation privatization, and in part because the nature of climate blogging has changed of late to requiring one to keep up with a fast flow of stories, and I just don't have the time.  Anyway, the new blog is called Park Privatization.  I hope those who are interested in the topic find it compelling.  If nothing else, at least with this post Google will now find it.  I will still post here regularly and on the climate blog as often as I can.

The first thing I do when I buy a DVD is rip it to my video server.  I have a 10TB RAID and I don't even try to compress the disks, just copy them over in video_ts format using DVDfab6.    I run SageTV on the server with the absolutely essential SageMC mod.  I then can watch the video at every TV that has a Sage HD200 box.  The whole system works for Bluray as well.

I built the system to try to duplicate a $60,000+ Kaleidoscape system for less than $2000, and the functionality, with some tweaking, comes pretty dang close.  The real work was the drudgery for ripping hundreds of DVD's, but I had already performed this death march with a much larger CD collection so I knew what I was getting into.   SageTV, by the way, is very rewarding if you want to get your hands dirty messing around in the innards but it is not for those who want plug and play.

Anyway, one of the reasons I did all this, beyond the coolness factor, was this.  I can rip just the main movie out of the DVD, leaving behind menus, trailers, FBI warmings, special features, etc.

Via the Telegraph:

The American blogosphere is going increasingly "viral" about a proposal advanced at the recent meeting of the Davos Economic Forum by Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, that an equivalent of a "driver's licence" should be introduced for access to the web. This totalitarian call has been backed by articles and blogs in Time magazine and the New York Times.

As bloggers have not been slow to point out, the system being proposed is very similar to one that the government of Red China reluctantly abandoned as too repressive. It was inevitable that, sooner or later, the usual unholy alliance of government totalitarians and big business would attempt to end the democratic free-for-all that is the blogosphere. The United Nations is showing similar interest in moving to eliminate free speech.

I called this one back in 2005.  This isn't the first attempt by the UN in particular to throttle free speech via licensing way back in 1985.