Dave Winer on supporting sport teams vs. political parties:
Look, I’m a Mets fan because I was a Mets fan when I was a kid. … I like to think I’m a Mets fan because they have better philosophy, but I know in my heart that it’s really the color of the hat.
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I also think that when people talk about The Left or The Right or conservative vs liberal, they’r really saying “I cling to the past when trying to understand the future.” I also think, sorry to say, that people who do this are idiots who don’t deserve a vote …
Dave’s forgetting music genres. I used to have the opinion that anyone who didn’t listen to heavy metal shouldn’t be allowed to vote either.
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A quote from Warren Buffett from yesterday’s New York Times op-ed (via 37signals):
Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful … What is likely is that the market will move higher, perhaps substantially so, well before either sentiment or the economy turns up. So if you wait for the robins, spring will be over.
Yesterday I bought his biography from Amazon, which should be an interesting read given that this is the guy who never seems to get caught up in the hubris. Apparently, the book is the first biography written with his full cooperation and collaboration.
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Paul Graham on Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy
The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies.
When Microsoft and Apple were founded.
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Someone who thinks “I better not start a startup now, because the economy is so bad” is making the same mistake as the people who thought during the Bubble “all I have to do is start a startup, and I’ll be rich.”
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Quote from Mike Arrington on What Android Can Learn From the iPhone:
… the apps on Android have a real chance of blowing away the apps on the iPhone some day just because Android is much more open …
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A quote from Jason Calcanis from the Guardian:
when the market goes down, people want measurable advertising, and the internet is the most measurable, performance-based advertising … so it’ll actually be good, long-term, for the internet.
The Economist had an interesting article on this back in 2006, The ultimate marketing machine, with a great quote from John Wanamaker, who not only invented department stores and price tags, but also became the first modern advertiser when he bought space in newspapers to promote his stores.
Wanamaker said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.”
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The Future of Web Apps expo last week (FOWA) started and ended on a religious note.
When I arrived on Thursday morning, I was greeted by hordes of people wearing red MyChurch t-shirts. “Good morning, good morning, good morning,” each of them greeted every new arrival.
At first I thought they might be a start-up at FOWA pulling a marketing stunt. But no, MyChurch, the christian social network, already is a thriving social network with an expo of their own.
Highlights of the FOWA expo itself included Languages don’t scale by Blaine Cook and Joe Stump and Huddle’s Andy McLoughlin’s part of How to survive prosper outside Silicon Valley (fast-forward into the middle for Andy’s part).
The expo ended in the same surreal way it started, except instead of MyChurch, this time it was the cult of Diggnation. The difference was not as obvious as one might have thought.
The expo itself was good fun and the Carsonified team obviously know how to stage these events. Kudos to them.
For a more detailed recap check out Mycycle and for a report from the fringe, the new media whore blog.
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Posted October 8, 2008, under
Iceland
An Icelandic newspaper, Morgunblaðið, published this cartoon today. Click on the image for a bigger version. Iceland sinking under the weight of their banks. Rough translation: “Too much free-market capitalism for the small island.” The weird thing is that I saw this on the BBC.
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I’ve been using Twitter search a lot recently to follow ongoing events in Iceland. (click: search results on “iceland”.) It is by far the fastest way to find links to new articles and news coverage and to get a snapshot of the zeitgeist of the situation.
I’m tempted to say this is the most useful tool I’ve found in a while since … that other search engine. I can only imagine how powerful this can be when Twitter gets more adoption.
Anyway, I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
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Matoda.com posted a write-up of an interview with Warren Buffet on CNBC. This is his take on why people repeatedly make mistakes that cause stock market crashes:
[when it comes to] greed … you can’t stand to see your neighbor getting rich. You know you’re smarter than he is, and he’s doing these things, you know, and he’s getting rich, and your spouse is getting unhappy with you because you aren’t — pretty soon you start doing it. And so you get what I call the natural progression, the three I’s: the innovators, the imitators, and the idiots.
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Posted September 26, 2008, under
Books
I wandered into Waterstones’ sci-fi section in Piccadilly the other day and before me stood the strangest book cover I’ve seen since Seth Godin’s Purple Cow:
Halting State, by Charlie Stross.
What’s clever is that the praise for the book isn’t on the back, the praise is the cover. The fact that the first quote was from William Gibson and that Eric Raymond is in the acknowledgements meant that I purchased a copy straight away. I later found out that the author is a Linux guru with a subsection of his homepage dedicated to published writings on Perl!
If a great cover, a Gibson quote and an author who uses Linux isn’t enough to sell you this book, check out Cory Doctorow’s review on Boing boing:
Blend an Iain Banks thriller with a copy of Count Zero, throw in the Tokyo Games Show and a Bourne movie (and possibly a Bourne shell) and you’ve got something approximating Halting State.
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