cowboyhero's comments

Clue me in about Facebook comments (I'm considering using them on a current project).

Why do you consider them a failure?

I thought Like + comments was pretty damned brilliant, because they make FB part of the infrastructure of so many sites. Plus, anecdotally, every time I turn around another site is rolling out the comments in a big way (like the LA Times recently did).

People don't read. They scan.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html

Your scrolling js metric is clever, but that doesn't mean they've read a thing. All it means is they've scrolled to the bottom of the page.

I generally like Siegler's stuff but he's so far down the rabbit hole now he can't see the reasoning behind concepts like 'bias' and 'disclosure.' Worse, he seems to be fully believe these things don't, or shouldn't, apply because he works in "new media."

It concerns me that a so-called bastion of tech reporting aspires to have all the ethics of TMZ or your friendly neighborhood penny stock newsletter pump and dump scam.

Because they're desperately trying to protect the sales of hardcover books, and, in part, trade paperbacks. They don't want to risk cannibalizing sales.

Consumers look at ebooks like another variation of the same product. Publishers don't. To them, it's an entirely separate entity. To them, the question you're asking could be (very roughly) translated to "I don't understand why concert tickets aren't the same price as a CD. It's the same music."

It's a bit backwards, and the same kind of thinking that made the MPAA consider the VCR a threat to movie theaters and the MLB think that nobody would buy tickets to the ballpark if games were broadcast for free on TV.

But I can understand why they're doing it. An enormous part of their legacy business model is wrapped up in hardcover book sales.

As for production costs, it would only be paper, printing, and distribution. Nobody ever thinks about pre-production costs or employee costs in professional editors, typesetters, and jacket design. That's a lot of dough that they have to lay out that still needs to be paid out whether we're talking ink or bits.

Correction: It's any computer, not just Windows PCs, and you can recycle old phones, iPods, and iPads too.

No, trademarks began and continue as a way to protect creators and commercial operators. It's a way to put your stamp on something and say "This is mine, I created it, I own it." It began, and remains, very closely tied to branding.

It's not about individual words. This is a red herring on Notch's part. Bethesda never claimed they owned "scrolls." They don't.

It's about Notch releasing a product in the same commercial space with a very similar sounding name to a product that Bethesda already owns.

As I said elsewhere, Bethesda must take action. They have no choice.

Bethesda has multiple trademarks for the franchise. Each individual installment is trademarked, eg "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim" and the entire franchise is trademarked, eg "The Elder Scrolls."

If you (in the collective sense, not you personally) know who Bethesda is and what games they've made in the past and know who Notch is, you're not the average consumer in this context.

I think there's a definite reason to think confusion could come into play when these titles are next to each other on the shelf, or show up in search results with little to no context, or are featured in Amazon's contextual results or on services like XBox Live or Steam.

Parents don't know Notch or gaming history. They know that little Timmy asked for a fantasy game with the word "scrolls" in the title. This situation, which I imagine would be pretty common at Christmas time, is part of why Bethesda is taking action.

The other part -- and this is the much more important part -- is that Bethesda has no choice. If they fail to take action and do their due diligence, and a competitor can later prove it (by citing this example with Notch) then they risk losing the mark entirely.

Which means then EA could conceivably come out with a game called "The Younger Scrolls: Obsession" and Bethesda would have no recourse.

This story annoys me to no end, because it points once again to a seemingly pervasive online and generational sense of entitlement when it comes to things like trademarks and copyright.

While C&D letters are never a nice surprise, Bethesda is right and Notch is wrong.

Given that these both involve computer games and computer games in the same or similar genre, it's entirely reasonable to think that the average consumer would be confused at the titles. (And I have trouble buying the line about the Google search. Even now, "Elder Scrolls" and a link to Bethesda's website shows up in the top 10 results, filter bubble be damned).

The article lacks detail in a way that reads as inaccurate. While it's true you have to protect marks from becoming generic, this involves defending them against all infringers, proving that you've done so, and also proving that you've used the mark in public within a certain amount of time. Which means that Bethesda is only doing what it's required to do to protect their franchise from this exact sort of situation.

While companies like Activision/Blizzard and Ubisoft do things that are of dubious benefit to their customers, I feel like in this case Notch is riling up a large fanbase and positioning this as big-corp versus the little-guy.

This is disingenuous on two levels. One, ignorance and entitlement aren't excuses (just ask Andy Baio and his $35,000 lesson in copyright fair use). Two, Notch is the public face of a company that, by all accounts, is worth millions of dollars.

It's time he started acting like it, educate himself, and put the babe-in-the-woods routine to rest.

PS: I'd also be very surprised if a trademark was granted on a generic dictionary word like "Scrolls."

Fair points, but:

1: This isn't exclusive to Groupon, and I'm not sure they're doing anything that CitySearch and AOL weren't doing in 1998.

2-3: Purely anecdotal but I've heard too many horror stories of small businesses being screwed by their groupon deals, essentially losing money on the discount and not attracting enough repeat business to justify the deal in the first place.

The problem with the model is that it attracts customers who are focused on price, not value. That's at odds with the proposition behind many specialty stores and boutiques (eg vinyl records, hair salons, upmarket clothing, etc).

Groupon as a standalone business just digitizes those local coupon books that used to come in the mail or be sold at bulk for ten bucks or whatever. That's a good web based business but not a great one.

Also, Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness.

Postman references Huxley/Orwell in the introduction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

I like the simplicity of this. Like headsclouds, I couldn't figure out at first how to make "sub" items. Due to old habits, I kept trying to hit "tab" to indent a new item.

Now for the hard part. In a previous career, I used to spend a lot of time with marketers. They always used to talk about "share of wallet" and the phrase stuck with me. In short: Unless someone is loose with their cash, there's a limited amount of money they're going to want to spend on online subscriptions (of any kind). Given that your app is actually more expensive than a month of Netflix or Amazon Prime, how do you justify the price?

Note: I'm not saying you need to lower your price, just that you need to be more explicit about the value proposition. Especially because stuff like Tadalist and Workflowy are free or freemium offerings.

I do this the Slashdot way; I don't read the articles at all. =P

(More accurately, I always read the comments here first on any title that looks interesting. If there's a good, heady discussion going, I'll go back and read the article after reading all the comments. If there's < 5 comments, I won't read the article at all.)

Two interesting things the articles blows right past:

- That they compare their algo to the ones used by Amazon and Netflix to recommend products, while ignoring that products have much better defined boundaries than people do. (And ignoring how both Amazon and Netflix suffered through some horribly bad recommendations in both their systems, early on).

- That they think Facebook (or any big social network) complements them, instead of rendering them irrelevant.

A dating service built on a matching you to real world friends-of-friends-of-friends has a much better chance at success than Match.com's "People who dated Alice also dated Mary, Jill, and Bertha. Sign up now for 1-Click Dating!"

> They don't package this information and sell it wholesale to advertisers.

Yet. Genie, meet bottle.

Thinking this information will never be sold is short sighted and naive.

When it becomes advantageous for them to do so, they'll sell it in a heartbeat and then sell it again. Somewhere in there the FBI and the NSA will start making "requests" for them to share with the government.

What begins as clever social commentary in movies like Minority Report tends to wind up as a sad fact of life years later.

Context is key. It's about positioning people in an ornamental, demeaning way and calling it "good fun" and "humor."

That is what makes it sexist, because is reduced to, literally, a pair of tits and under the greater context of "Google is Sexy."

Nobody is arguing that just posting a pic of an attractive woman is sexist.

I noticed you didn't answer my question, though: What message do you think this sends to potential CS coeds?

Almost positive that's a direct quote toward the end of Alan Moore's V for Vendetta.

Which kinda makes me grin and roll my eyes at the same time.

He's a burgeoning pundit. Media, other leaders, and new people in the industry will take their cues from him.

You ever hear the joke, "Hey, dpark, what do you call a black man who has a PhD from Harvard?" It's an awful punchline, with a little bit of a truism: The perception that, no matter how smart you are and how hard you work, there's a percentage out there that will view you as less than nothing. You don't count, your contributions don't count.

Now, in that context, what kind of message do you think attaching that photo to a pundit's post about new media technology says to the 18 year old girl who's thinking about majoring in CS?

But hey, fuck it, right? It's a harmless joke and we're taking this too seriously. She'd probably be happier going in marketing anyway.

It's not just "some guy." It's Tom Anderson of mySpace fame, who Techcrunch is working hard to position as some kind of senior statesmen of social media. His articles are getting picked up by Techmeme and are pulling a lot of eyeballs lately.

It's irresponsible and immature to attach that image to an article titled "Google is Sexy." If he were 19 years old and posting to Reddit, then yeah, whatever. Nobody would care. But I think anyone who's in any kind of leadership position should know a little better.

100% agree and I'm glad you said something.

I clicked the link, saw the photo, blinked in disbelief and closed the window without reading Tom's article.

So awesome that the guys get to be the nerds while the woman is literally nothing more than an ornament, existing solely to fill out Google's logo.

I mean, seriously? That's the kind of cheap "humor" that I expect out of strip club signage.

(For the record, even though it shouldn't matter: I'm a guy)

Eh. They did a vanity site to promote a product.

When Goog starts adding /marquee/ tags and VBScript to their browser, I'll start getting worried about "openness."