(photo: Evil Erin)

Matt Yglesias analyzes the failure of the progressive block strategy, and chalks it up to progressives not picking issues that centrists care about.

He doesn't note his own role in that failure, vilifying the leader of the progressive block Raul Grijalva as the world's greatest monster unless he backs down. (Our own whip effort started to back Grijalva's efforts, which were already underway in the House when we started in June of 2009.)

I've said many times that it's impossible to expect progressive members of Congress to hold together if they don't have the backing of their natural fiscal constituencies the liberal interest groups and the unions. Without that support, they're left to raise money from PACS and other corporate sources to sufficiently fund their campaigns. That's why they take turns championing progressive bills that ultimately fail so they can pretend they do something, and then vote for bad bills that ultimately pass so someone else can be the failed hero. When Tammy Baldwin votes for one PhRMA-friendly bill after another, progressives can say hey, but she's so good on LGBT issues! Which never actually pass either, but the kabuki keeps activists sufficiently docile and donating to large organizations who fundraise off amping up outrage.

But it's also worthy to note that it's hard for them to withstand the assault of liberal pundits who sneeringly derided their efforts as naive, futile and purist. They should be proudly taking credit for their role in delegitimizing progressive opposition to the bill in liberal intellectual circles, much the same role that the same people played during the Iraq war. After all, it's TNR's stock in trade.

I'll leave it to others to analyze how corporate cash was laundered through foundations to underwrite the efforts of various opinion leaders in the health care debate, but it definitely deserves more scrutiny. . .

Monday, June 1, 2009

Kaiser Family Foundation Launches New Non-Profit Health Policy News Service

Menlo Park, CA In the midst of a major federal health reform debate and the ongoing financial turmoil in the media industry, the Kaiser Family Foundation officially launched Kaiser Health News (KHN) today to provide a new source of in-depth reporting on major health issues. KHN is staffed by experienced health policy journalists and editors, and will feature contributions from a wide array of leading health policy commentators and independent journalists.

[]

At the heart of KHN will be in-depth, explanatory stories about complex health policy issues and major developments in Washington, D.C., and around the country in the health care marketplace and health care delivery system. The news service will cover policy stories like health care reform, developments in major public health coverage programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and complicated ongoing policy challenges like the financing of long-term care, and it will examine the nation's health care system from a consumer perspective. KHN will also provide a synthesis of health policy news coverage through a daily health policy report, original programming from Kaiser's broadcast studio, and regular columns from contributing writers and experts. Jonathan Cohn, senior editor of The New Republic, and Howard Gleckman, senior research associate at the Urban Institute and former senior correspondent at Business Week, will be writing bi-weekly columns. Among others who will contribute occasional columns are: Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute, Jim Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Judy Feder of the Center for American Progress, and Mark Pauly of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

The development of Jonathan Gruber's much-vaunted model, which formed the justification for econo-wonks and politicians alike to support the Senate bill's voodoo claims about the excise tax, was originally paid for by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 1999 according to Gruber. It was given a facelift this year courtesy of the Small Business Majority, whose money comes from foundations including the Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation. (h/t spanishinquisition)

And recall that Kaiser Permanente was the original sponsor of the Washington Post pay-to-play salons.

You have to wonder if any of that Kaiser cash underwrote other efforts at the Post after the parties fell through.

HCAN's efforts were funded by Atlantic Philanthropies, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and George Soros foundations, among others.

So, come on, pundits. Don't let the lameness of progressives in Congress get all the credit for shooting down the public option, rolling back choice, and teeing up constitutional amendments to overturn the health care bill around the country.

Stand proud.

Tags: Blogosphere, Jonathan Gruber, Kaiser Family Foundation, Matt Yglesias, Media, new media, Raul Grijalva, Robert Wood Johnson, The New Republic, TNR, veal pen

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As of a month ago Trader's title had been downgraded to VP of Partnerships and Studio Services, although no top sales or business development replacement executive has yet been named.

Why is he gone? No one is saying. CEO Mark Pincus says only AT [Andrew Trader] and zynga have parted ways. He made an awesome contribution. We need to continue scaling the company. Trader hasn't yet returned a phone call asking for his comment.

Zynga's revenue growth has been nothing short of astronomical over the last 18 months, so it would be hard to blame him for not bringing in the dollars. Perhaps he took the fall for the Scamville saga although that has largely blown over now.

Trader was with Zynga nearly three years, so he's vested on a lot of his stock. Given how much money is at stake, the whole story about why the first cofounder of Zynga has left the building may never come out. Zynga raised $180 million in December 2009, at a rumored valuation of above $2 billion.

And no, I have no idea why he's holding a banana in the picture.

For that big screen device ... there's no diversity. You get exactly the Xboxes that we build for you. We may have more form factors in the future that are designed for various price points and options, but we think it's going to [be] important.

Steve Ballmer teases new Xbox 360 form factors, price points and options originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 06 Mar 2010 05:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

140proof, which is based in San Francisco and backed by a $2-million investment raised last summer from Blue Run Ventures and Founders Fund, said that its algorithm aims ads at users based on their profiles and other public data. Other Twitter advertising services include Ad.ly, which has gotten some press attention for paying celebrities such as Kim Kardashian thousands of dollars to endorse products to their followers, as well as Magpie, Assetize and IZEA.

The question all of these services will inevitably confront including Twitter itself, once it launches its own platform is how users will react to a wave of advertising in what was once an ad-free social network (in the case of 140proof, of course, you can simply not use HootSuite's mobile apps and you won't see them). Many of these services are only just ramping up in what will undoubtedly become a much bigger campaign to bring ads to the Twittersphere. So what will you do when ads start appearing in your Twitter stream?

Related content from GigaOm Pro (sub req'd):

How Human Users Are Holding Twitter Back

Facebook users in the American West appear to move around a lot, and often have friends throughout the country, while users from Minnesota to Manhattan have connections much closer to home.

And in areas in and around Texas, on the edge of what's generally thought of as the Bible Belt, the Dallas Cowboys rank higher overall on users' fan pages than God.

These are just some of the interesting findings about Facebook users recently discovered by Pete Warden, a Colorado-based, British-born ex-Apple engineer who has spent the last six months gathering and analyzing data from more than 215 million public Facebook profile pages.

What he's discovered just might shed more light on the culture of connected America than the 2010 census.

"If you actually look at [Facebook user data] in the aggregate, it's like a painting," Warden told TechNewsDaily. "Each individual data point isn't interesting, but when you step back and look at the trends in millions of profiles, you start to see some pretty interesting pictures emerging."

Warden says he's been overwhelmed by the response he's gotten from this project, after working on similar projects in obscurity for years.

Among Warden's less surprising findings: Fox News host Glen Beck gets the number one spot on Facebook fan pages from users in Eastern Idaho. And the "Twilight" books, penned by Mormon author Stephenie Meyer, rank high in the heavily Mormon communities in and around Utah.

Facebook mining

These and other observations that Warden mined from the massive amount of Facebook data were posted on his blog last week, along with maps that break down the U.S. into seven regions based on Facebook user trends.

Now, after gathering the data from Facebook's site using software he designed and honed in the process, and making a first round of enticing observations, he wants to turn the raw data he's culled over to academia for further analysis. But he also hopes to steer investors and customers to his own software and services for further data gathering and aggregation.

"I'm much better at building the pipeline for processing the data than I am at doing really rigorous stuff with the results that come out at the end," Warden said in a telephone interview. "The patterns that I've blogged about in the U.S. data are very qualitative."

Indeed, much of the conclusions that Warden has drawn are open to interpretation, and his given names for America's regional social connection groups "Stayathomia" (the Northeast), "Socalistan" (Souther California), and "Mormonia" (the predominantly Mormon towns in Utah and Eastern Idaho) among them are playfully clever, but not very scientific.

Serious about privacy

But Warden is serious when it comes to people's privacy concerns, even though all the data being gathered is publicly available on Facebook's site, and can be found via Google. He says he wants to make the data useful for large-scale data analysis, but not for tracking down individuals.

"We want to make sure we don't help scammers, we don't help spammers, and we respect people's privacy," Warden said, "but also allow some sort of new insight to come out of this."

To that end, Warden has delayed releasing the data for the time being (he initially intended to release it yesterday, Feb. 9), after someone from Facebook contacted him, asking for some time to check the privacy implications.

Once Facebook clears the data for release to the academic world, Warden says he's ready to pass the task of interpreting all this data on to others and feature their conclusions on his blog more often than his own.

Meanwhile, Warden has some problems to patch in his data pipe, problems that have been helpfully pointed out by readers of his blog.

"One of the great things about getting this out there is having thousands of pairs of eyes to look over this stuff, like the fact that [the data shows] the top name in Alexandria, Louisiana is Mohamed," Warden said.

"When somebody pointed out that some of the profiles seemed to be coming from Alexandria, Egypt, that was a head-slapping moment."

• Teens Favor Social Media Over Blogs
• How is Google Buzz Different from Facebook and Twitter?
• Tips for Protecting Your Online Reputation

Alicia Keys

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Alicia Keys
Keys performing at Pavilho Atlntico in Lisbon, Portugal on March 19, 2008
Background information
Birth name	Alicia Augello Cook
Also known as	Lellow
Born	January 25, 1981 (1981-01-25) (age 29)
Origin	New York City, New York, United States
Genres	R&B, soul
Occupations	Singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger, record producer, actress, music video director, author, poet
Instruments	Vocals, piano, keyboards, cello, synthesizer, vocoder, guitar, bass
Years active	1985present
Labels	Columbia, Arista, J
Website	www.aliciakeys.com

Alicia Augello Cook (born January 25, 1981), better known by her stage name Alicia Keys, is an American recording artist, musician and actress. She was raised by a single mother in the Hell's Kitchen area of Manhattan in New York City. At age seven, Keys began to play classical music on the piano. She attended Professional Performing Arts School and graduated at 16 as valedictorian. She later attended Columbia University before dropping out to pursue her music career. Keys released her debut album with J Records, having had previous record deals first with Columbia and then Arista Records.

Keys' debut album, Songs in A Minor, was a commercial success, selling over 12 million copies worldwide. She became the best-selling new artist and best-selling R&B artist of 2001. The album earned Keys five Grammy Awards in 2002, including Best New Artist and Song of the Year for "Fallin'". Her second studio album, The Diary of Alicia Keys, was released in 2003 and was also another success worldwide, selling eight million copies. The album garnered her an additional four Grammy Awards in 2005. Later that year, she released her first live album, Unplugged, which debuted at number one in the United States. She became the first female to have an MTV Unplugged album to debut at number one and the highest since Nirvana in 1994.

Keys made guest appearances on several television series in the following years, beginning with Charmed. She made her film debut in Smokin' Aces and went on to appear in The Nanny Diaries in 2007. Her third studio album, As I Am, was released in the same year and sold six million copies worldwide, earning Keys an additional three Grammy Awards. The following year, she appeared in The Secret Life of Bees, which earned her a nomination at the NAACP Image Awards. She released her fourth album, The Element of Freedom, on December 15, 2009. Throughout her career, Keys has won numerous awards and has sold over 30 million albums worldwide, establishing herself as one of the best-selling artists of her time. On December 11, 2009 Alicia Key's was ranked as top R&B artist, the fifth top overall artist and the second top female artist (behind only Beyonce) of the 2000-2009 decade by the Billboard Magazine decade end chart. ^[

Now picture our perspective leaving our own experiences, zooming out and up until we can see how all the different groups are interacting on a worldwide social network. That bird's-eye view could be both beautiful and horrible if the resolution was clear enough. That's what a Ramen-eating, ex-Apple engineer named Pete Warden is about to release to the public this week.

Sponsor

This Wednesday, Warden will make Friend, Fan page and name data from hundreds of millions of Facebook users available to the academic research community. It's a move that Facebook has to have seen coming, a move that many in the data-centric community have been calling on the company itself to do for years, and an event that's been complicated by Facebook's recent privacy policy changes, which have muddied the waters of right and wrong but rendered even more data available for outside analysis.

If what people call Web 2.0 was all about creating new technologies that made it easy for everyday people to publish their thoughts, social connections and activities, then the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness, and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public. It's a very exciting future, and Warden is about to fire one of the earliest big shots in that direction.

Nerds in Space: Social Graph Analysis For Solving Large-Group Problems

Warden studied Computer Vision in college in the U.K., then got into game development. After moving to L.A., he spent six years building graphics drivers for the original Playstation and the XBox. Then he started his own independent business, where, thankfully, he open-sourced much of his work (something he's still doing today).

When he found out that starting his own business wasn't going to work with his immigration status, he was very fortunate to have also caught Apple's eye with the software he had been releasing to the public. Apple bought his company in order to bring him on board. The proceeds of that small sale are now sustaining his next project after going independent again.

After spending five years at Apple struggling to navigate the maze of people and connections and types of expertise in order to get the information he needed, Warden decided to go independent and build a company that solved exactly that kind of problem. "I can't think of a better big company to work for, but it was still a big company," he says. "It was hard to find the right people to talk to, whether for particular expertise or for contacts at external companies." And so Warden left Apple to build a company that would use social graph analysis to solve problems like that. He called the company Mailana, a play on "mail analysis" since he was initially focused on email social graph analysis.

We've written here a number of times about Mailana's tool that analyzes the social graph of any Twitter user. Enter the username of someone on Twitter and Mailana will show you which 20 other people the user has exchanged the largest number of reciprocal public @ replies with. Find someone interesting or important? Mailana's Twitter analyzer will tell you who they most regularly interact with. See, for example, The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Rockstars on Twitter.

Pulling Down the Facebook Social Graph

Now Warden is about to unveil a much larger project along the same vein. For the past six months he's been crawling public profile pages on Facebook. He now has more than 215 million of them indexed and updated about once a month. When he began he was using the Web crawling service 80legs, but over time he had to build his own crawling infrastructure.

When I talked to him this afternoon, he had already begun uploading 100 GB of user data onto his server to make it available for academic research starting on Wednesday. Warden says he's removed identifying profile URLs but kept names, locations, Fan page lists and partial Friends lists. All those fields of data are just waiting to be analyzed and cross referenced. That's one very rich resource.

Yesterday Warden posted some of his own initial observations from the data on his personal blog. Those included:

• In almost every state in the Southern U.S., God is number one most popular Fan page among Facebook users. Among people in the L.A., San Francisco and Nevada regions? "God hardly makes an appearance on the fan pages, but sports aren't that popular either," Warden writes. "Michael Jackson is a particular favorite, and San Francisco puts Barack Obama in the top spot." In the Oregon and Idaho region? Starbucks is number one.
• In the Mormon-influenced areas of Utah and Eastern Idaho, the most popular Fan pages are The Book of Mormon, Glen Beck and the vampire book Twilight, which was authored by a Mormon.
• The bulk of Warden's posted analysis yesterday was about location networks. People in the western U.S. tend to have Facebook friends all over the country; people in the southern U.S. tend to mostly be friends with people who have remained in the same area.

Taking a Deeper Look

These observations are interesting, but they are only the beginning of what's possible. Name, location, friends and interests are great data points to analyze. Warden has written a program that will estimate gender as well, based on names. All these data points can be cross-referenced with outside data, too. Members of Facebook's own staff did this kind of analysis when they compared user last names to U.S. Census data, which allowed them to estimate changes in Facebook's racial composition over time based on the likelihood of people with particular last names to report a particular racial backgrounds.

"I'm mostly thinking 'What do I try first?'," Warden says. "There's so many interesting ways to slice the data - especially as I'm starting to get changes over time. I'm also trying to map out political networks in aggregate; how polarized the fans of particular politicians are - so how likely a Sarah Palin fan is to have any friends who are fans of Obama, and how that varies with location too. One of my favorite results is that Texans are more likely to be fans of the Dallas Cowboys than God."

Warden says he hasn't talked to anyone from Facebook since he started crawling the site, but he did get an email from someone on the security team asking him to take down instructions he'd posted that exposed a security hole that made harvesting peoples' email addresses easy. So the company is paying attention. "I'd love to see them put me out of business by putting decent data out there," Warden says. He says his Amazon Web Services bill was over $5,000 last month.

Why is he indexing all this content and why is he going to hand it over to the academic world later this week? "I am fascinated by how we can build tools to understand our world and connect people based on all the data we're just littering the Internet with," Warden says.

"Nobody thinks about how much valuable information they're generating just by friending people and fanning pages. It's like we're constantly voting in a hundred different ways every day. And I'm a starry-eyed believer that we'll be able to change the world for the better using that neglected information. It's like an x-ray for the whole country - we can see all sorts of hidden details of who we're friends with, where we live, what we like."

For a great example of the kind of social impact that data analysis can make, Warden points to some of the fascinating ways that GIS data is illuminating the intersection of race and public services. Data has shed light on social injustices for decades, and measurable information about the interactions of hundreds of millions of people every day on Facebook offers opportunities to discover both good and bad news about the contemporary human condition.

Warden says he's not yet been able to interest any investors in his ideas for businesses based on this data, so his girlfriend Liz Baumann, a former insurance actuary, stepped in to help and is now running much of the crawling. He says he's now focused on "working on ways of presenting all this information in a form that answers questions for people willing to pay." His first experiment along those lines is the very interesting FanPageAnalytics.com.

What does Pete Warden hope for from this week's public release of all this Facebook data? "Hopefully I'll get to see a bunch of interesting [academic research] papers come out of it, worst case. And I'd like to be the guy people turn to when they need stuff like this."

Already well-respected among a fringe group of bleeding-edge geeks, we hope that Warden's work on social graph analysis will end up impacting a far larger number of people than may ever know his name.

Dallas Lawrence is Chair of the Social and Digital Media Practice at Levick Strategic Communications, the nation's top crisis communications firm. He blogs on emerging digital media trends and best practices for social media engagement on Bulletproof Blog. Connect with him on Twitter @dallaslawrence.

Social networks have truly come of age in the last year. No longer viewed as lonely outposts for youthful college slackers, the reach of these platforms has grown exponentially. Today, more than two-thirds of the world's Internet users visit the social networking sites that reel in billions of eyeballs every 24 hours.

Yet, despite the staggering growth of social networking, determining how to monetize social media platforms remains a tough code to crack for even the savviest of companies. As such, identifying new revenue models will be instrumental in kicking off the next cycle of the social networking phenomenon in 2010.

If Anyone Can Do It, Facebook Can

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Facebook, social networking's acknowledged leader, has surpassed every platform on the market today, corralling more than 350 million unique users globally. If any social network is poised to design a winning formula for successful revenue streams in 2010, it's Facebook. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has set an aggressive agenda for the company, publically stating that he expects social networks to become as essential as web browsers and operating systems, and he has set the lofty yet entirely realistic goal of 1 billion users worldwide.

In the less than five years since it expanded beyond scholastic audiences, Facebook has not only grabbed the lion's share of users, it has engaged them like no other platform on the Internet. The average Facebook user visits the site at least once a day and spends an astounding 55 minutes engaging friends and family - statistics that another Zucker (Jeff) would probably kill for over at NBC.

While translating such popularity into dollars and cents isn't easy - especially in an industry whose users have grown accustomed to getting something for nothing - Facebook could potentially provide a monetization template that would revolutionize social networking as we know it.

The Next Level of Advertising Revenue

---

Advertising has traditionally provided the simplest means of generating revenue. PricewaterhouseCoopers reported in October that Internet advertising revenues totaled $10.9 billion for the first half of 2009. It's been estimated that Facebook alone took in $435 million of that total. But for a site with nearly half a billion users, a quarter of which spend more time within the network than watching television, these numbers represent just the beginning potential.

First, Facebook needs to admit to itself that it is in the business of selling ads. By better managing its advertising network, intelligently expanding its marketing options, and developing workable social ads that leverage the branding power of friends and connections, Facebook can begin to capture its rightful share of online ad revenues. The final piece is to increase awareness and understanding of Facebook ads among corporate decision makers.

For example, every executive in America today understands the value of purchasing Google ads - and that didn't happen by accident. Google understood that what caused it to dominate online search wasn't going to ultimately position the company as a global corporate powerhouse valued at nearly $200 billion. Google's aggressive marketing, communications, and lobbying shops have worked to ensure every ad buyer, political campaign, marketing executive, and public relations flack knows the value of the service and has direct and easy access to account executives who explain the much worshiped ROI Google ads provide.

Today, Facebook stands on the precipice Google inhabited just before it became a top money-maker. By taking a page from the Google playbook, and aggressively marketing and explaining its power to influence buying decisions, Facebook ads could become as essential to 21st Century marketing as the yellow pages were in the 20th Century.

E-Commerce Stop Sending Customers Away

---

The launch of Facebook as a true e-commerce site holds immense potential as a business solution and could forever change the way we shop. Online purchases through the first three quarters of 2009 totaled $98.3 billion according to the Department of Commerce. For the majority of companies selling products online who are also engaged on Facebook, opening Facebook fully to direct e-commerce transactions will dramatically change how businesses advertise and how consumers buy goods online.

Consumers and companies would flock to a Facebook storefront for one simple reason: We do everything else there. Imagine an integrated, one-click solution whereby your friends see your recent purchases (because you were incentivized by the brand to share your information) in their feed and are able to simply point, click, and purchase the same item.

With a few adjustments, companies can make timely offers of birthday gifts for friends, travel arrangements for event items, or the latest music from favorite artists - and make the sale without forcing the user to leave Facebook or put in new login information.

Rather than driving their 350 million users away from the platform to close the deal with retailers and purchase the item on an external platform, Facebook could benefit financially by charging companies a percentage of sales, a fixed rate to have a storefront, or from increased advertising opportunities.

Premium Subscription Options

---

Finally, whether users like it or not, Facebook will do itself a long term disservice if it does not consider premium subscription options. Users (whether they are corporations or teenagers) are amenable to paying for even the simplest features and functionality, as evidenced by the success of Facebook gifts.

Nothing good in life is free. It's a stark, mature reality that Facebook (and its users) need to face in 2010. By leveraging economies of scale, Facebook can churn a sizable profit without alienating users. Would you pay one dollar a month to share higher-resolution photos or upload higher-quality or longer videos? Last month, 2.5 billion photos were uploaded to Facebook. Even if only a quarter of the site's active users opted for premium options, this one change would generate more than $1 billion in annual revenues.

Improving advertising, developing an e-commerce platform, and adding subscription services will not only generate the revenue necessary to make the transition from highly adopted to highly profitable, it will open revenue streams as Google did before for the next generation of digital developments.

More business resources from Mashable:

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- Social Media Marketing: How Pepsi Got It Right
- 5 Ways Small Businesses Can Avoid Social Media Panic
- HOW TO: Take Advantage of Social Media in Your E-mail Marketing
- HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy
- 18 Online Productivity Tools for Your Business

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, peterspiro

Tags: advertising, business, e-commerce, facebook, MARKETING, monetization, monetizing, money, social media, social networks

Less than 100 tickets remain for Mashable's Social Media Week event, NextUp NYC The Future Journalist on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 92YTribeca.

Join us for networking and a conversation and Q&A with Sree Sreenivasan (Professor and Columbia Journalism School Dean of Student Affairs and contributing editor of DNAinfo.com) and Vadim Lavrusik (new media journalist and digital media graduate student at Columbia University Journalism School).

Details

Location: 92Y Tribeca, 200 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10013

Socialize: Facebook Event Page

Pricing: $20 in advance, $25 at door. Tickets on Sale Now.

Food and drink: Full cash bar and food menu available

Schedule

• 6:00 7:15 = Open Networking
• 7:15 8:45 = Conversation and Q&A with Sree Sreenivasan and Vadim Lavrusik
• 8:45 Bar Close = Open Networking

A Conversation and Q&A with:

Sree Sreenivasan Prof. Sree Sreenivasan, Columbia Journalism School Dean of Student Affairs and contributing editor, DNAinfo.com.

Sree Sreenivasan is a tech evangelist and skeptic specializing in explaining technology to non-techies. He is a professor and dean of students affairs at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, where he teaches in the digital media program. Sreenivasan is contributing editor at DNAinfo.com, a Manhattan-news startup he helped launch in 2009 with Joe Ricketts, the founder of Ameritrade and whose family just bought the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field. He also has been a fixture on NYC-area television. For more than eight years, he served as technology reporter for WABC-TV and WNBC-TV and now occasionally appears on various TV shows (on CNN, NBC's Today Show, CNBC and elsewhere) to talk tech. He has written articles for The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Rolling Stone, National Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes and Popular Science. You can find him on Twitter at twitter.com/sreenet and on the Web at sree.net.

Vadim Lavrusik Online journalist and M.S. candidate in Digital Media at Columbia Journalism School

Vadim Lavrusik is a new media journalist and social media consultant studying digital media at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism where he is launching NYC 3.0, a tech start-up news site as part of his Master's project. He's reported for publications like the Star Tribune, The Minnesota Daily, the Mpls./St. Paul Business Journal and most recently was a guest feature writer for Mashable.com, where he covered trends in news media, and contributed to Poynter Online's E-Media Tidbits. You can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/lavrusik and the Web lavrusik.com.

Thanks to our Sponsors

Pepsi believes in the power of people and their ideas to make positive change. That's why Pepsi is giving away more than $20 million this year to fund good ideas, big and small, that move communities forward. The Pepsi Refresh Project invites individuals to share their ideas about how they can refresh the world. The public votes for their favorite ideas and Pepsi will give out up to $1.3 million each month to fund the winning ideas. Pepsi is leveraging the power of social media platforms to inspire ideas and encourage individuals to participate.

Zemoga is an award-winning digital innovation agency that specializes in the creation of meaningful and engaging interactive experiences and applications. With offices in the US and Colombia, Zemoga empowers customers with groundbreaking solutions through a model that provides efficiencies at every level. Zemoga's clients include Sears Holdings, HBO, ING, Yahoo, Viacom, A&E Television Networks, Toyota, SONY Music, and Rodale.

Thanks to our Partner

Tags: Events, nextup-nyc, social media week

It won't.

I was talking not long ago with editorial folks at an unnamed media company that rhymes with The New York Times. There was some possibility of my blogging over there. They were intrigued, but couldn't fit it into their grand plan, at least not right away. The problem was resources were already allocated and such an endeavor takes months to mount and costs tens of thousands of dollars.

No it doesn't, and that's the problem with Big Media.

When I was at PBS we did occasional redesigns and I never knew what they cost because for most of my 11 years there I was just a paid contributor. But toward the end of my tenure I became a producer which means I was finally exposed to budgets and was, to some extent, even responsible for paying some of them. And I was shocked to learn that my final design for a Moveable Type blog over there did, indeed, cost tens of thousands of dollars many tens of thousands of dollars.

PBS isn't a company that rhymes with The New York Times but it still qualifies as Big Media, so the pricing was more or less confirmed.

Now look at the screen you are reading right now, my Wordpress blog at cringely.com. It cost me NOTHING to design. I did it myself in a single night with the help of an experienced and generous friend, Benjamin Higginbotham of Spacevidcast.com. This blog is hosted by Media Temple in Los Angeles and costs me $50 per month, which is a lot compared to most blogs, but then I'm getting more than a million page-views per month. One more Christmas card or IBM column and I might bump up to $100 per month just to get some more resources, but I think I've made my point: a good Internet media product doesn't have to cost a lot of money. This is my living, remember, that's putting three kids through school. What are my gross margins 10,000 percent?

While those are my gross margins they aren't the gross margins at PBS or at a company that rhymes with The New York Times. Those outfits have overhead I don't. They have legacy relationships and obligations I can't even imagine. They can't just go from there to here in an instant even if they wanted to.

Which brings us back to the iSomething to be introduced tomorrow. No matter how great it is, it can't support the legacy infrastructure of Big Media, which includes mid-town office buildings and business lunches (hence my picture of New York's 21 Club, if you hadn't already figured that out).

Big Media wants revenue approaching what they could charge if a web site was a printed magazine. Remember the original lure of the Internet for publishers was the idea that there would be more profit without the expenses of printing and distribution. But it didn't work out that way because Internet users won't generally pay for content.

But Apple has the mojo. Steve Jobs has been firm from the start that content should be paid for and his generally is, except of course for my podcast on iTunes. Big Media likes the way Steve thinks. And so they can with one breath condemn him for killing the music album, yet in a second breath they can see him as the savior of magazines, newspapers, and good-but-thinly-watched TV series.

And Apple CAN be that savior, but only after a rationalization and severe downsizing of Big Media overhead, which I am not at all sure Big Media is really ready to do.

Based on the rumors I've heard so far I'm guessing the new Apple product will be like the Apple TV a hobby, a critical success but a business failure, though one with enough potential that Apple will give it a few years to succeed. It's in giving those few years where Apple really can save Big Media, which will undoubtedly by then be not so big.

It's hard to say from the company's fourth quarter results. Verizon rolled out the Motorola-made handset the first Verizon model to run Google's Android smartphone operating system during the fourth quarter in an effort to counteract the impact of the Apple iPhone, currently offered exclusively by AT&T.

You'd think if the device produced a world-beating market reaction, Verizon wouldn't have been shy about trumpeting that success. Alas, no such bugle-tooting can be found in Verizon's release, leaving it to the balance sheet sleuths employed as Wall Street analysts to poke around for proof that Droid may have contributed positively.

On the company's conference call, CFO John Killian said that the Droid has been extremely well received. While Verizon subsidized the cost of the handset, bringing down gross margins in its wireless division, Killian said 26% of the company's annual-subscriber (retail) wireless customers held smartphones or multimedia devices.

This translated into 26.6% growth in data revenue, whereas overall wireless service revenue grew 5%.

Droid and other new phones most likely led the better-than-expected rise in post-paid that is, those who pay monthly bills and sign service contracts subscribers.

Verizon Wireless reported 1.1 million postpaid net adds, up from 900k last quarter, which means the Motorola Droid probably helped retain some high end customers, wrote Morgan Keegan analysts, adding but that was not a game changer' for the company.

The lingering question now is whether the Droid's fleeting moment in the sun has come and gone. The Google Nexus One made by Taiwan's HTC has garnered a lot of attention since it was unveiled earlier this month. But in talking with Journal reporters after its release, some analysts said the Nexus doesn't appear to have much functionality beyond other Android phones. There's not a whole lot of difference between Nexus One and the Droid, said Tero Kuittinen, a senior analyst at MKM Partners.

What do you think? Would you opt for the slightly older Droid over the Nexus One if the price was right? Let us know in the comments section below.

Intel wanted to knock the socks of CES attendees this year with its booth and found a great way to succeed.

They created Infoscape, a massive 7 1/2 foot square double HD (4k) partial cube with custom software to pull XML feeds in real-time and display them as a series of hundreds to thousands of rotating cubes.

They didn't stop there, however. They swung for the fences by adding interactivity with the two walls by integrating touch. Anyone could come up to the wall and touch the cubes to trigger the selection of that cube's content.

The best way to describe it would be that it was like clicking a photo online and having it popup in a lightbox with a transparent background, but with many open at once.

It turns out that this was only a display element for the booth and not a real product. The intention was highlight the i7 processor. This chip has over 600 million transistors on it and is the size of a dime. One single chip powered both screens.

3D wishes it had the juice that this wall did. If this wall were the future of television I'd feel a whole lot better about what Samsung, Panasonic and Sony were shilling.

This thing just goes to show that sometimes the best products are accidents. Look for Intel to find other uses for Infoscape this year.

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Intel Touch Wall Infoscape #CES is a post from: TechStartups.com

The Florida Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee issued an (advisory) opinion [link] which included the following question and answer:

[May] a judge may add lawyers who may appear before the judge as "friends" on a social networking site, and permit such lawyers to add the judge as their "friend."

ANSWER: No.

[h/t WSJ Law Blog] I thought this conclusion was off base, even after you discount for the fact that Florida has some wacky rules governing advertising by lawyers. My question to the advisory committee is whether this means that it's now inappropriate for a judge to have lunch with a lawyer friend, or engage in email banter with lawyer friends? Is attending the same party now off limits? I assume these actions would still be viewed as appropriate, given that lawyers and judges interact socially (and publicly) all the time. What's so special about Facebook friendship? In the end, the advisory committee should heed the words of one district court

[T]he Court assigns no significance to the Facebook "friends" reference. Facebook reportedly has more than 200 million active users, and the average user has 120 "friends" on the site. . . . Indeed, "friendships" on Facebook may be as fleeting as the flick of a delete button.

Quigley Corp. v. Karkus, No. 09-1725, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 41296, at *16, n.3 (E.D. Pa. May 19, 2009) (mentioned here and here). With this said, judges and lawyers may want to be careful (driven by common sense), and in any event, minimize their Facebook friending activity while a case is ongoing. [See Techdirt's discussion of a judge-lawyer Facebook friending snafu here.]

[Added: see additional coverage in Silicon Alley's Business Insider: "Florida Judges May not Friend Local Lawyers on Facebook".]

Friend, smart dude and all-around good guy Micah Baldwin wrote up a post yesterday that hurt me a little bit quite a bit, if I must be honest. It bothers me because he's right.

On every account of where the failure to find funding comes from us, me, you he's right. Whether it's not searching in the right spot, pitching the wrong story, a flawed product or the inability to get over ones self-importance, the blame can go to one person, you.

Let's break this down . . .

I want to focus on one section from the post and give it a bit more fleshing out for those that might need it. This is especially important for those that are preparing to go out for funding the first time.

If you are struggling to raise money, look back at the decision points:

1. Does your idea excite the people you are talking to;
2. Do you excite the people you are talking to;
3. Are you talking to the right' people (not the easy' or big name' people)?

Three

I'd like to speak to them in a new order with number 3 being first. This is the hardest one to get right and the most important. Being enamored by the big name' will only lead to heart break and misery when the big name' investors tell you no. That no could be for one of a million reasons but most likely number 1 or 2.

The right people are those that don't already have portfolio of companies that can do what you are looking to do, they could be someone that you strike up a conversation with at a conference or the seat next to you on a plane.

Believe me on this from when I went through it, the people I should have focused on pitching were right in front of my face and asked for more of my time. I was too enamored with big names and brands to see these opportunities.

The right people also don't have to be early investors in other up and coming startups. There are plenty of investors in the fringe that might be able to help even more. It is a matter of finding them.

One

On the account of number 1, Does your idea excite the people your are talking to? It must if you've gotten your foot through the door. If you haven't haven't, don't be disheartened with a quick no from a potential investor. They are respecting your time by not wasting it.

To maintain this excitement, prepare like you have never prepared before. Take the time to analyze your business, role play your presentation and be certain to understand the investor you are pitching. If a friend helped to put you in this position, ask them for some advice. Cover your bases.

Two

On the account of number 2, Do you excite the people you are talking to? The answer is really up to you. If you get number one right and convey the passion that you have for the startup then the answer is yes. If you get elements of number one right but not all of them, you'll definitely lose points. Those points could cost you the funding and more importantly a future relationship with the potential investor.

Conclusion

Micah's post is brilliant. Any entrepreneur that is looking to raise capital should study, answer all of the questions he asks and fill in any other missing components that they see fit. It is a blue print for how to be a digital hustler and mean it.

Now that I think about it, there is another set of guidelines that combined with Micah's thoughts could be the ultimate startup cocktail Mike Dunn's Tech Due Diligence. That is a cocktail worth whipping up.

Photo credit: (cc) Kenneth Yeung www.thelettertwo.com

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

The Right Investor and You is a post from: TechStartups.com

As the war of words ramps up between Google and some news publishers, the latest spin seems to be how worthless the traffic is that Google sends. In reality, the traffic probably does have value, but the newspapers are likely doing a terrible job of monetizing it.

I'll give some examples in a minute, but how about an imaginary story to illustrate the problem?

Let's say a newspaper executive opens a store. They put some story headlines up in their shop window.

Now one of those old fashioned newskids comes along. You know, the type that you'd see in movies selling papers on the street. Let's call the kid Google.

Google reads the headlines and then scampers off down the street, shouting out to people things like Senate's debating health care! or 1 out of 4 homeowners are in the red!

Some of these people are interested. They ask this Google kid for more information, and Google sends them back to the news store.

At the store, the news exec owner greets visitors by asking them what the hell they want. Perplexed, they visitors say they heard about these stories and wanted to know more. The exec shouts at them. Get the hell out of my store, you freeloader! This is for members-only. We don't need riff-raff like you in here.

That's a hell of a way to run a business, don't you think? But it's pretty much how News Corporation execs seem to view the world. Consider what News Corp digital chief Jonathan Miller said earlier this month:

The traffic which comes in from Google brings a consumer who more often than not read one article and then leaves the site. That is the least valuable of traffic to us the economic impact [of not having content indexed by Google] is not as great as you might think. You can survive without it.

Today, we got similar remarks from James Moroney, executive vice president of A.H. Belo, which publishes the Dallas Morning News and other papers:

This is traffic that's not being monetized to any great degree, Moroney said. It's akin to a person who drops into town, buys one copy of your newspaper and leaves town again and yet you spend a whole bunch of time building your business around that type of customer.

Let's be clear about one reason why these statements are coming out. This is round two against Google. In round one, some publishers said Google steals our content. Google's response was that it sends them millions of visitors for free. So in round two, it's time to make out like those visitors aren't worth much. That's especially important if you're an executive who, after floating the idea of dropping Google, comes under attack as stupidly cutting your own throat.

Me, I see visitors as opportunities. This is the internet, where you can tell far more about a visitor to your web site than you can in print. You can tell:

• They're visiting for the first time or on a repeat basis
• They came from Google
• They came from a specific page, or using specific search terms
• The geographic area they're located in

And the visitor who buys your paper printed on a dead tree out of a newsstand? You can tell you sold a copy. And that's it. That regular subscriber? You know they live in a particular area, maybe some demographic info, but you can't custom your dead tree version in any way to target for that.

Can you imagine what would happen if the Wall Street Journal did a one time promotion where for a day, they gave away 1 million copies of their paper? Since there's a real cost to doing so, don't you think they'd figure out a way to make that promotion count? They'd sell special ads? They'd have a super attractive subscription offer?

But on the internet, where they're not paying anything for all that traffic flowing from Google, there just doesn't seem to be any effort. Millions of people are just written off as worthless. If they're watching The Simpsons on Murdoch's Fox TV network, they're valuable (see Free Isn't A Four-Letter Word Offline, So Why Does The Media Hate It Online?). Put the exact same people on the internet, and suddenly they're net neaderthals.

The problem isn't with the people. They didn't suddenly change when sitting in front of a computer keyboard. They don't suddenly have less money. They aren't suddenly less attractive marketing prospects. The problem is with how you're targeting them.

Remember what Miller said? That most of these visitors read a story once and then leave? Well, clearly the WSJ has some analytics running to understand that. Someone, somewhere has churned a report to arm Miller with that information. But that same data can be used to target those visitors better.

Time for a real life example. Today, at lunch, in the hard copy of the Wall Street Journal that I pay $100 per year for, I read a story bout how 1 in 4 US homeowners are underwater or owing more than their homes are worth.

I guess I have at least $100 per year in value to the Wall Street Journal, since I'm a subscriber. But that's gross revenue. Someone's being paid to deliver the hard copy to my door. There are print costs involved with producing it. I doubt the $100 I pay per year covers all that. But the WSJ also convinces advertisers that I'm somehow valuable to them, which is why they pay to place quality ads in the WSJ like this in front of me:

Now that same story is currently being featured on Google. The minute I click from Google to read it, I'm transformed. My $100 per year value is lost. Instead, I become one of those people who Miller says that he doesn't make any money from.

Well, let's see what I get:

That's the beginning of the story. It is EXACTLY the same thing I see if I read this story by clicking through to it from a link on the WSJ's home page (they've made it free to anyone from there). It's also the same thing I see when I'm logged in using my paid account.

Why is the WSJ treating the one-time / first-time visitor the same way as a regular reader? See those two big arrows I've drawn pointing into the story? I'm pointing out that one of the top goals the WSJ would have for first time visitors is to get them to take that 2 week free offer to subscribe or to take one of the free stay connected via email or RSS options. And yet, these things are shoved off to the top and side of the page.

Place them in front of the reader! At worst, you lose nothing. But more likely, you've slightly interrupted one of those freeloaders in the same way you interrupt them when they watch News Corp TV shows and get commercials. And more of them will convert. They may buy more subscriptions, or they may register so you can do outreach marketing to them.

Meanwhile, money IS being made, even off the supposed freeloaders. There's a big ad sitting there off to the site, plus another one right above. Oh, there's too much ad inventory? Then find a way to convince your advertisers to buy more ads or pay more for them, which probably means showing that your ads perform well. And if they're not performing well, fix your problem. Why aren't they?

This is an article about mortgage owners being underwater. Can we assume some of the readers are attracted to it because they may want help with their mortgages? Are there no companies that offer this to type of service? Are there no ad execs who could figure out how to reach them?

Instead, I get served with an ad from Zurich about how to buy the right insurance for my business. Seriously? That's the ad you show me? This is targeting? Roll out one of those Get a mortgage for below 5% ads that I see offline everywhere.

Even better, here's another ad that also shows for this article:

Yeah, in an article about how people can't afford their homes, you show me an ad about buying an iconic residential masterpiece in Boca Raton. And when I don't click on that, because it has nothing to do with my interests, you call me a freeloader.

Your loss, I think. I've got money to spend. Plenty of your visitors do. You're just not figuring out how to get it from me.

That visitor from Google? Show them a completely different experience, if you want. Article and ad, perhaps embedded within the content (labeled as ads, but inline, rather than off to the side). Please, go hire someone like Jeremy Shoemaker or Jennifer Slegg, both of whom live and breathe how to make as much money out of visitors as possible.

Do something. Anything. Please. Survive. But there's one thing you shouldn't do. Blame others for sending you visitors and not figuring out how to make money off of them.

We've all had to deal with losing our most precious data photos of family, spreadsheets and the 1.5 million images of kitties being cute. I joke, but we have all been there, that moment when you know that your data is gone.

You sit crushed under the weight of the mental notes you are taking about what has been lost. Then you realize that you have a backup maybe. That it might be accessible from another computer maybe.

With a solution offered by Spare Backup there is no maybe. Their software ensures that your data is saved, it's in a format that you can recognize with icons for you applications and it is accessible in more ways than one. More than one? They offer an innovative mobile solution as well as an easily navigated online backup.

My first impressions of the mobile access and online service have been favorable. I have been able to access data backups with ease on mobile. Sure I can't restore my computer from it but without having to wait to get a new one up and running I can look at those cute kitty pictures.

As for internet access, the best feature of Spare Backup's offering isn't really the storage, it is awesome too but plays second fiddle to a masterfully designed user interface for getting to your backup data. The interface is icon driven and succeeds where most consumer backup services fail making the icons useful and descriptive for the kind of files you will find behind them.

Spare Backup offers three levels of service to customers: single pc, family pack to backup five computers to one account and a corporate package. They all offer the standard online backup to the cloud and the ability to burn the data to fixed media like CD/DVD. I'm sure if you are stealthy enough you could use another app to create an .ISO backup and send it over to an external drive.

If you're looking for a new solution for backing up your computer, take a look at Spare Backup. They have a long history of improving their software since going public in 2003. Unlike most startups, if you like the service that Spare Backup provides you can actually buy into the company, as they are publicly traded. Another funding method that we'll address in a future post.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Spare Backup and Spare Yourself Some Pain is a post from: TechStartups.com

This is my last feed post for a while. I swear.

That said, it might be the most important one that can help startups, bloggers and established media makers begin to deliver new and better experiences to users.

Check out the Kris is reading section of Croncast. Go and check it out, be quick. I'll be here when you get back.

Glad to have you back.

So what the was that, right?

Croncast is my playground for all things nerdy that I can then apply to in my trade without doing it with a client's dime. So when things break I am not on the hook .

What you just saw was an interesting concept that enhances sharing information online and makes it more personable. You just met the full content feed reader, Kris the Filter'.

I'm going to describe that link destination the best way I can.

1. My server reads my Google Reader shared feed and stores it in a database. This is done with a script that runs on a cron (timed job) every two minutes to get new items post title, description and timestamp
2. The script stamps the item with the current time that I most likely read the item
3. This is cool the server runs a script to generate keywords (subjects) from the shared item. The script needs to mature a bit but it is effective enough for now.
4. Then cached posts are pulled up in to the Kris is reading section of the site and ordered by the time that I read them. Really the only way to organize them coherently since the post original times vary based on the author's time zone.
5. Keywords are displayed below each post. Each keyword is a link that will search all of my other shared items for related posts, has a link to Technorati and is an entry into a RSS feed for that keyword.
6. I have added a Search my read items' function so that you can search my shared items for whatever you like. If you want to find items that I have read about about ceratin topic like, Facebook, you can.

What's happening here is that I am giving you, the reader of my shared feed, the ability to use me as a content filter. And the best part is that you didn't have to ask me to read up on a given topic that you are interested in. I didn't have to add it to a to-do list, I was already doing it. And now I'm able to give you access to it in a few ways:

1. Here's everything that I have read and shared from Google Reader
2. Here's everything that I have read now search it by subject
3. Here's everything that I have read now subscribe via RSS to a subject (keyword) and get updates every time I read an item about your subject without needing to come back to this post or the site

In this scenario I have become a 'social filter'. I am able to share an item from a publisher that my current readers might have never found. In a strange way it gives an individual like myself the chance to create a low threshold directory with the ability to be distributed simply by marking items that I like.

It takes Google Reader to a new place beyond a feed reader and makes it a platform for syndication. Google Reader becomes a powerful tool to create new channels of distribution for content that usually meets its end on a subscribers computer. Now it has legs.

How can I see other people using this? Tons of ways.

1. The same way that I am using it to create a history of my own reading with the ability to share right down to the topic level.
2. By individuals respected as gate keepers like librarians. Example whether the source feeds were running on their library content or the internet they could mark items from those feeds and then give the feed based on a topic to a patron, i.e. happy computer savvy student who doesn't need to come back and ask for help again.
3. Could be used to share information behind a firewall from corporate blogs. Great way to fatten up a corporate knowledge base by picking and choosing from your qualified authors.
4. You could create micro-repositories based on topics
5. A million other ways that I haven't thought of yet. Not even quite sure I could come up with a million.

I know that I am not the first to work over a shared feed this way but it was fun to build and I am sure it will be useful in making something else. Maybe it will inspire someone else to do something cool.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

Make Use Of Google Reader Shared Feeds is a post from: TechStartups.com

Can't make it to SoHo anytime soon or in this lifetime? Then you should head over to StyleCaster to get a sense of what ambitious, smart fashion is walking the streets of NYC South of Houston. New York is teeming with this apparel and footwear clacking away to catch a cab.

StyleCaster is most definitely a Big Apple property, which is only to its benefit as they grow their site. The city is a fashion and media capital.

With the new boom of startup activity on the East Coast they find themselves in a great position to gain users, make partnerships (both tech savvy and with traditional media) and to be in the epicenter of the next fashion trends. Think what Portfolio.com used to be, but for fashion.

Fashion sites often suffer from a lack of depth, see content, or lack of tech to make them accessible. They often rely heavily on motion graphics in Flash and a business model based on revenue from affiliate sales. Not StyleCaster. They have mixed all the ingredients and a some other special sauce to create a complete user experience.

It would be hard to write this review if I didn't break their site down from the beginning. StyleCaster is three distinct properties that have been plied together with one smaller cousin: Fashion Recommendations, Social Network, News/Blog and Shopping (the smaller cousin).

Fashion Recommendations

This is the core value proposition for StyleCaster. They deliver a tailored interface for weather and season with 360 degree model views.

Earlier this summer they took this concept and created an iPhone app that was just as robust as their site. The experience that they are able to deliver with their Daily Looks section should make retailers jealous. They have merged seamless cross-selling with the common sense that your friend might recommend and item to you.

Social Network

Everyone wants on this bandwagon for many reasons and the number one being to get funded. I'm not sure if this is what got StyleCaster $4 million but this is how it is done right, in case you were wondering.

They first look to a larger network, in this case Facebook, and integrate with their API through Connect. Second, they take this data and create an onsite profile each registrant. Third, and final in this process of hooking user into their community, they make it drop dead simple to engage with other users based on contributor types, cities, at random and a 15 minutes of fame section. A simple horizontal navigation that tracks users onsite fashionista moves.

News/Blog

Fashion Recommendations might be the awesome wow factor that you need to attract the fashion forward and a Social Network to get users connected and spending time on your site but the most impressive feature of this site isn't really a feature. The Newsroom and Blog sections of StyleCaster are destinations for an insiders perspective on fashion. This is where the magic of this site is made.

This is content that matches the ambition and smarts of the fashion they follow . . . delivers and then some. My only gripe is that the IA and taxonomy is lacking lacking and it can be difficult to find much of the great content that is buried in the site.

StyleCaster's headlines can be seen on other fashion/celeb sites around the net but smart money would probably say that there are more partnerships in the works to deliver full content. I'm not smart money, so I can't say for sure.

Shopping

Well, what would a fashion site be without shopping? I called this the one smaller cousin' and I mean it. Simply put, the focus of this site is obviously to build a company and a brand based on high quality content, technology and a great user experience. It wasn't built with shopping at its core. And that is awesome! There is a solid enough foundation in place that if StyleCaster went down this road they would find success but not as much as they will find by having all of other components in place.

I've gushed quite a bit here over what is just another startup. They are just another startup that needs to prove itself in the marketplace. I believe they will. And even if they don't, this business, with any one of the three aforementioned sections would make any entrepreneur very happy with the traffic they could bring. Kudos to the team that are making this happen. They're getting done the right way.

It wouldn't be right to do a post about a fashion startup without some snark, now would it?

If you have ever wanted to release that inner hater, head to The Daily Looks section and spin them tall skinny models round and round until your petty little heart is content. Not that I did or would want to do this.

Tip if you do: Play house music to make it a party. Remember, you can't do this in SoHo!

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StyleCaster Is Your SoHo Connection is a post from: TechStartups.com

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Beginning this Thursday October 22, 2009 the Grey Lady is having a fire sale on talent and will offer the entire newsroom staff buyouts. If there aren't at least 100 takers then they are going start layoffs.

This sale won't last forever!

Soon the New York Times won't have anyone to layoff except executives.

In preparation for this day you should do the following:

1. Get Your Domain make it sound newsy
2. Write up a press release proclaiming the death of newspapers and journalism as we know it
3. Put together a business plan that proclaims size of the market near $3 billion, your prowess as a digital publisher and your ability with the power of tried and true journalists to change the face of reporting
4. Get funded Maybe you already got heavy pockets so you can skip this one
5. Stand in front of New York Times at 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10018 and talk to everyone leaving the building to build your talent pool from the newly unemployed. You could skip this by some creative social engineering with someone in HR but what fun would that be?
6. Compete with HuffingtonPost and MediaBistro (not a typo, they're making moves) in 2 years as the King of digital news delivery

You can get this done by Thursday, right? If not, don't sweat it. There will be more talent coming down the pipe as newspapers continue to implode. They can't seem to get out of the way of themselves when it comes to finding ways to remain relevant. The path to solvency surely isn't new local market print publications.

I might have over simplified my points in this post, but you get the idea.

I believe journalism has its place in our society and journalists should be rewarded with business decisions that allow them to practice their craft. Without this, we lose valuable information, insight and opportunity to make the world a better place. Journalists and their newsroom cohorts make a difference. The medium of transmission doesn't matter as much as the content.

If you build your journalism 2.0 business the right way, the best journalists and newsroomers will want to join up. And after them, will come a new crop of journos fresh out of school. As Tim Gunn says, Make it work!

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Post from: TechStartups.com

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Dogster has never been a Web 2.0 darling. At first glance a social network for pets isn't the most innovative idea, and its audience is limited to the kinds of wackos who make name tags for their dogs at conferences or create elaborate fictional personalities for their cats.

But with the benefit of hindsight, Dogster has done two things very, very right: It never raised venture funding and never relied on an ad network for revenues. The result is its network of sites Dogster, Catster and Snuzzy that focused on maximizing revenues early on instead of aiming for user growth for the sake of user growth. While many other Web 2.0 names are struggling to raise more money to stay in business, Dogster has been profitable since the second quarter of 2007 and is solidly in control of its own destiny. (Full disclosure: Michael Arrington was a very early angel investor. His statement about his investments is here.)

Not only thatpremium ad sales for the sites are up 20% this year. Why? Because while hot sites like Digg and Facebook outsourced ads to big players like Microsoft and smaller sites outsourced them to Google, Dogster has invested five years in building direct relationships with big pet food, supply and other consumer packaged good brands. We figured each $50,000 ad deal was like getting another angel investor, says Ted Rheingold, Dogster CEO.

These aren't lame banners. These are coupons, contests and other things that incent users to interact with the brand. A recent example was a coupon from Royal Canin Cat Food. The company was hoping for 500 takers and it got 5,000. As a result Dogster and Catster charge $10-$12 CPMs and as high as $40 CPMs for their newsletter. (I interviewed Rheingold about this strategy back when I was co-hosting TechTicker. The clip is below.)

But there's a problem. Dogster is still a small site and even happy advertisers will only continue to pay so much to reach the same users. So Dogster has solved that by deciding to become in essence the thing that it always argued startups shouldn't work with: Ad resellers.

Dogster will now sell ads for the much larger Cheezburger Network of Lolanimal-related sites that include IHasaHotdog and ICanHazCheezburgera never-ending meme that will hit one billion page views later this week. That's 10 billion cat pictures served, says founder Ben Huh. At 72 pixels per inch, if you laid them out end-to-end it would reach the moon and back four times. (I'm guessing that moon part is actually true. Huh also told me that under the new deal every time they sold an ad, Dogster would ship them a free dog.)

The two have just closed their first sale to Clorox for Fresh Step Kitty Litter. Sexy? Maybe not. But it's lucrative. But Dogster is no longer in the one million-unique category, it's selling for six million uniques and until the CPM dies, this is still a volume industry. Neither company would comment much on the economics, but Dogster is taking a smaller cut than a traditional ad network would. In exchange, Cheezburger Networks has to do more work to make sure the ads are effective, whether it's creating a contest or just tracking the metrics the way Dogster already does in house.

It's an interesting announcement, since ICanHazCheezburger is so much larger and better known. Typically it's the smaller site that outsources inventory to the giant. But the founders Huh and Rheingold were long time friends who'd frequently ask each other's advice: Rheingold would ask how Huh got those gaudy user numbers and Huh would ask how on earth Rheingold was so good at monetization. Looks like the two will now be able to actually share those areas of expertise: Dogster now gets a network of six million uniques and Huh gets much higher revenues.

Neither of the deals is exclusive. Dogster plans to add more complementary sites to its ad inventory and Cheezburger Networks plans to ink similar partnerships for properties with non-pet user profiles like the FailBlog and newly launched ItMadeMyDay.comwhich has already hit one million page views.

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Getting started with the site is quite easy, because Outright has recently partnered with a number of financial services: you can import invoices from Freshbooks, receipts from Shoeboxed, your PayPal transaction history, as well as your credit card transactions through a deal with Expensify, which supports 94% of US credit cards. You only have to do this once once you've linked your account, they'll keep automatically updating until you unlink them.

Once you're done with the initial setup, everything on Outright is fairly self-explanatory (which is sort of the idea). The home screen presents you with a chart pitting your costs against your income to give you an at-a-glance look at your business's health. At the top of the screen you'll see tabs for Income, Expenses, Taxes, and Reports, where you can hone in on the transactions you're looking for. Transactions are automatically sorted into different categories (for example, the site knows that your airline's tickets belong under the Travel' category), and you can also generate reports on a per-customer basis, which would be helpful for eBay sellers. Beyond that the application helps with taxes by offering reminders when a deadline is coming up and an estimated amount that you'll have to pay.

Outright isn't as robust as some other financial services out there, but if you're looking to keep things simple it's certainly worth a look. The company was formerly called GoBoostrap.com, but changed its name in conjunction with news of its $2 million funding in February.

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Database normalization is a technique for designing relational database schemas that ensures that the data is optimal for ad-hoc querying and that modifications such as deletion or insertion of data does not lead to data inconsistency. Database denormalization is the process of optimizing your database for reads by creating redundant data. A consequence of denormalization is that insertions or deletions could cause data inconsistency if not uniformly applied to all redundant copies of the data within the database.

Why Denormalize Your Database?

Today, lots of Web applications have "social" features. A consequence of this is that whenever I look at content or a user in that service, there is always additional content from other users that also needs to be pulled in to page. When you visit the typical profile on a social network like Facebook or MySpace, data for all the people that are friends with that user needs to be pulled in. Or when you visit a shared bookmark on del.icio.us you need data for all the users who have tagged and bookmarked that URL as well. Performing a query across the entire user base for "all the users who are friends with Robert Scoble" or "all the users who have bookmarked this blog link" is expensive even with caching. It is orders of magnitude faster to return the data if it is precalculated and all written to the same place.

This is optimizes your reads at the cost of incurring more writes to the system. It also means that you'll end up with redundant data because there will be multiple copies of some amount of user data as we try to ensure the locality of data.

A good example of a Web application deciding to make this trade off is the recent post on the Digg Blog entitled Looking to the Future with Cassandra which contains the following excerpt

The Problem

In both models, we're computing the intersection of two sets:

1. Users who dugg an item.
2. Users that have befriended the digger.

The Relational Model

The schema for this information in MySQL is:

CREATE TABLE `Diggs` ( `id` INT(11), `itemid` INT(11), `userid` INT(11),
`digdate` DATETIME, PRIMARY KEY (`id`), KEY `user` (`userid`), KEY `item` (`itemid`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;   CREATE TABLE `Friends` ( `id` INT(10)
AUTO_INCREMENT, `userid` INT(10), `username` VARCHAR(15), `friendid` INT(10), `friendname`
VARCHAR(15), `mutual` TINYINT(1), `date_created` DATETIME, PRIMARY KEY (`id`), UNIQUE
KEY `Friend_unique` (`userid`,`friendid`), KEY `Friend_friend` (`friendid`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB
DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

The Friends table contains many million rows, while Diggs holds hundreds of millions. Computing the intersection with a JOIN is much too slow in MySQL, so we have to do it in PHP. The steps are:

1. Query Friends for all my friends. With a cold cache, this takes around 1.5 seconds to complete.
2. Query Diggs for any diggs of a specific item by a user in the set of friend user IDs. This query is enormous, and looks something like:

   SELECT
   `digdate`, `id` FROM `Diggs` WHERE `userid` IN (59, 9006, 15989, 16045, 29183, 30220,
   62511, 75212, 79006) AND itemid = 13084479 ORDER BY `digdate` DESC, `id` DESC LIMIT
   4;

   The real query is actually much worse than this, since the IN clause contains every friend of the user, and this can balloon to hundreds of user IDs. A full query can actually clock in at 1.5kb, which is many times larger than the actual data we want. With a cold cache, this query can take 14 seconds to execute.

Of course, both queries are cached, but due to the user-specific nature of this data, it doesn't help much.

The solution the Digg development team went with was to denormalize the data. They also went an additional step and decided that since the data was no longer being kept in a relational manner there was no point in using a traditional relational database (i.e. MySQL) and instead they migrated to a non-RDBMS technology to solve this problem.

How Denormalization Changes Your Application

There are a number of things to keep in mind once you choose to denormalize your data including

1. Denormalization means data redundancy which translates to significantly increased storage costs. The fully denormalized data set from the Digg exampled ended up being 3 terabytes of information. It is typical for developers to underestimate the data bloat that occurs once data is denormalized.

2. Fixing data inconsistency is now the job of the application. Let's say each user has a list of the user names of all of their friends. What happens when one of these users changes their user name? In a normalized database that is a simple UPDATE query to change a single piece of data and then it will be current everywhere it is shown on the site. In a denormalized database, there now has to be a mechanism for fixing up this name in all of the dozens, hundreds or thousands of places it appears. Most services that create denormalized databases have "fixup" jobs that are constantly running on the database to fix such inconsistencies.

The No-SQL Movement vs. Abusing Relational Databases for Fun & Profit

If you're a web developer interested in building large scale applications, it doesn't take long in reading the various best practices on getting Web applications to scale such as practicing database sharding or eschewing transactions before it begins to sound like all the advice you are getting is about ignoring or abusing the key features that define a modern relational database system. Taken to its logical extreme all you really need is a key<->value or tuple store that supports some level of query functionality and has decent persistence semantics. Thus the NoSQL movement was borne.

The No-SQL movement is a used to describe the increasing usage of non-relational databases among Web developers. This approach has initially pioneered by large scale Web companies like Facebook (Cassandra), Amazon (Dynamo) & Google (BigTable) but now is finding its way down to smaller sites like Digg. Unlike relational databases, there is a yet to be a solid technical definition of what it means for a product to be a "NoSQL" database aside from the fact that it isn't a relational database. Commonalities include lack of fixed schemas {TODO}. Below is a list of some of the more popular NoSQL databases that you can try today along with a brief description of their key qualities

1. CouchDB: A document-oriented database where documents can be thought of as JSON/JavaScript objects. Creation, retrieval, update and deletion (CRUD) operations are performed via a RESTful API and support ACID properties. Rich querying is handled by creating Javascript functions called "Views" which can operate on the documents in the database via Map/Reduce style queries. Usage: Although popular among the geek set most users seem to be dabblers as opposed to large scale web companies.

2. Cassandra: A key-value store where each key-value pair comes with a timestamp and can be grouped together into a column family (i.e. a table). There is also a notion of super columns which are columns that contain whose values are a list of other key-value pairs. Cassandra is optimized to be always writable and uses eventual consistency to deal with the conflicts that inevitably occur when a distributed system aims to be always writable yet node failure is a fact of life. Querying is available via the Cassandra Thrift API and supports fairly basic data retrieval operations based on key values and column names. Usage: Originally developed and still used at Facebook today. Digg and Rackspace are the most recent big name adopters.

3. Voldemort: Very similar to Cassandra which is unsurprising since they are both inspired by Amazon's Dynamo. Voldemort is a key-value store where each key value pair comes with a timestamp and eventual consistency is used to address write anomalies. Values can contain a list of further key value pairs. Data access involves creation, retrieval and deletion of serialized objects whose format can be one of JSON, strings, binary BLOBs, serialized Java objects and Google Protocol Buffers. Rich querying is non-existent, simple get and put operations are all that exist. Usage: Originally developed and still used at LinkedIn.

There are a number of other interesting NoSQL databases such as HBase, MongoDB and Dynomite but the three above seem to be the most mature from my initial analysis. In general, most of them seem to be a clone of BigTable, Dynamo or some amalgam of ideas from both papers. The most original so far has been CouchDB.

An alternative to betting on a speculative database technologies at varying levels of maturity is to misuse an existing mature relational database product. As mentioned earlier, many large scale sites use relational databases but eschew relational features such as transactions and joins to achieve scalability. Some developers have even taken that practice to an extreme and built schema-less data models on top of traditional relational database. A great example of this How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data which is a blog post excerpted below

Lots of projects exist designed to tackle the problem storing data with flexible schemas and building new indexes on the fly (e.g., CouchDB). However, none of them seemed widely-used enough by large sites to inspire confidence. In the tests we read about and ran ourselves, none of the projects were stable or battle-tested enough for our needs (see this somewhat outdated article on CouchDB, for example). MySQL works. It doesn't corrupt data. Replication works. We understand its limitations already. We like MySQL for storage, just not RDBMS usage patterns.

After some deliberation, we decided to implement a "schema-less" storage system on top of MySQL rather than use a completely new storage system.

Our datastore stores schema-less bags of properties (e.g., JSON objects or Python dictionaries). The only required property of stored entities is id, a 16-byte UUID. The rest of the entity is opaque as far as the datastore is concerned. We can change the "schema" simply by storing new properties.

In MySQL, our entities are stored in a table that looks like this:

CREATE TABLE entities ( added_id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY
KEY, id BINARY(16) NOT NULL, updated TIMESTAMP NOT NULL, body MEDIUMBLOB, UNIQUE KEY
(id), KEY (updated) ) ENGINE=InnoDB; 

The added_id column is present because InnoDB stores data rows physically in primary key order. The AUTO_INCREMENT primary key ensures new entities are written sequentially on disk after old entities, which helps for both read and write locality (new entities tend to be read more frequently than old entities since FriendFeed pages are ordered reverse-chronologically). Entity bodies are stored as zlib-compressed, pickled Python dictionaries.

Now that the FriendFeed team works at Facebook I suspect they'll end up deciding that a NoSQL database that has solved a good story around replication and fault tolerance is more amenable to solving the problem of building a schema-less database than storing key<->value pairs in a SQL database where the value is a serialized Python object.

As a Web developer it's always a good idea to know what the current practices are in the industry even if they seem a bit too crazy to adoptyet.

Further Reading

• How FriendFeed Uses MySQL to Store Schema-less Data by Bret Taylor
• Looking to the future with Cassandra Digg Blog

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The Census Bureau's latest annual report offers a snapshot of the economic well-being of American households for 2008, the first full year of the recession. It shows that the poverty rate hit 13.2 percent, an 11-year high.

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While many people stereotype geeks as only being interested in using the computer all day, the truth is that a geek is actually a person who often contemplates many of the deeper questions of the universe while busy installing the coolest new add-ons to Firefox or tweaking their mobile phone so that they can control it from their desktop. One of the universal debates many geeks have centers around an important question that involves neurobiology and the science of artificial intelligence, and that question is Does a human think faster than a computer?

What a question. Just think of the necessary evidence that one would need to produce in order to prove, or disprove, that statement. In fact, what is the question about really? Is it whether a human brain or a computer is faster, or is it which form of information processing is better? Is it even a fair comparison? Today, I'd like to engage MakeUseOf readers into a debate on this subject by first providing my own take and then asking for yours.

The Question: Does a Human Think Faster Than a Computer?

The question itself represents the fallacy of how people think about computers. When a person uses a computer, if it's slow then it's junk. But there are certainly other factors to consider when examining intelligence what about image recognition, language recognition, multi-tasking capabilities or self-learning and self-healing features?

First, to partially answer the speed question we need to examine data transmission. In the Hartford Examiner, writer Joy Casad answers the question, How fast is a thought by describing the chemical/biological propagation of thinking neurons before getting to the point in the final paragraph these neurons transmit signals at 0.5 milliseconds. That's pretty fast!

In 2006, the fastest reported fiber optic transmission rate was 2.56 terabits a second. Okay, but a bit is nothing more than a zero and a one. Well the current state of the art is the cutting edge subatomic technology created by Stanford researchers representing one bit with 35 electrons, or 35,000,000,000 electrons a millisecond. Due to the fact that axon/neuron electrical transmission depends on the chemical and biological environment it is in, data transmission of one neuron is actually millions of times slower than the fastest electrical transmission rates over copper electrical wire, and even slower compared to fiber optics. Score one for computers.

What About Processing Power?

The question of processing is a tricky one. According to the Top500 list of super computers, the fastest one as of 2009 is the RoadRunner BladeCenter at 12.8 GFlops (floating point operations per second).

A GFlop represents a billion operations per second. Now, you're thinking of that Monday morning in class when your professor asked you to perform a simple calculation and your mind went blank. You're ready to chalk up another point to computers, right? Wrong.

While the transmission of electrical impulses may be slower in the brain than over wire, the processing power of the brain is represented by not one, but thousands of processors backed into one major super computer. One example is the retina, which is sort of like your computer web cam, in that it transmits light (images) to the brain for processing. Except the retina itself has its own processing power, sort of like a subprocessor 100 million neurons packed into a one centimeter by one millimeter space.

This stunning little processor is capable of processing ten images, each of about a million light points, every single second. Not only that, the data isn't transmitted over a single fiber of nerve cells, but over a cable to the brain made up of a million of these fibers, all transmitting bits of data at the same time in parallel. If you multiply the processing power of this volume of neurons by the overall size of the average 1,500 cubic cm human brain, the overall processing power of the brain is about 100 million, million operations per second. For those of you who are trying to do the math with your super computer brain that's over 100,000 times more processing power than today's cutting-edge super computer.

Image and Language Recognition, Learning and Common Sense

If our brains are such super computers, then why do we feel so dense and so slow sometimes? I don't know about you, but I'm horrible at doing calculations in my head. The problem is that people think of computers only in terms of how many calculations it can do per second. The truth is, when it comes to intelligence there's so much more to process than calculations alone. How do you calculate what the tone of someone's voice implies they are really saying? How do you calculate the irony of a joke that, when taken literally, makes no sense at all? This is where the true power of the human brain makes itself known.

Have you ever had a friend who was such a genius that they could perform the most astounding calculations in their head, or they could fathom the most complex equations or problems imaginable yet when faced with the simplest common-sense joke, they just didn't get it? This is the major difference between a human brain and a computer.

Author Gary Marcus writes, in his book on the human mind that, The fundamental difference between computers and the human mind is in the basic organization of memory.

What he means is that a computer organizes information in a logical way. To retrieve data, the computer uses logical storage locations. A human brain, on the other hand, remembers where information is stored based on cues. Those cues are other pieces of information or memories connected to the information you need to retrieve. This means that the human mind can connect an almost unlimited number of concepts in a variety of ways, and then sometimes disconnect or recreate connections based on new information. This allows the human to step outside the boundaries of what has already been learned leading to new art and new inventions that are the trademark of the human race.

There are a lot of other ways the human mind blows computers away it can self repair itself, it can produce chemical reactions within its host body to induce instinctive reactions and protect itself from danger, it can handle every last function required to operate the machine of the human body while simultaneously processing information from outside that body, and most importantly it can continue learning and building new connections within that contextual storage array in ways that seem infinite.

In short, the answer to the question Does a human think faster than a computer? is yes. And it can also do a whole lot more than that.

Geeks out there weigh in with your opinion in the comments section below!

Image Credits: cbowns

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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