Protect positive, hard working people from the slackers

Posted on March 8, 2008
Filed Under Opinion | Leave a Comment

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Jason Calacanis started an interesting debate about keeping costs down in a startup. One of his points was to fire people who were not workaholics, later changed to fire people who don’t love their work.

Fire people who are not workaholics. don’t love their work… come on folks, this is startup life, it’s not a game. don’t work at a startup if you’re not into it–go work at the post office or stabucks if you’re not into it you want balance in your life. For realz.

He got some heat from Duncan Riley from TechCrunch and the guys at 37 Signals. I my opinion Calacanis is right.

Startups run on cash. It’s like oxygen to them and without cash you will die a painful death. Anyone who has stressed out to the point of feeling like you’re going to throw up about missing a payroll or has had to close down an operation knows just how precious cash and time are.

The right people make all the positive difference in the world. Pissing away time and money on the wrong people is a sure path to failure. And not only do slackers waste time and money, they demoralize the people who are working hard to make it a success.

Verizon Fios Redirection Problems

Posted on February 26, 2008
Filed Under General | 5 Comments

Verizon has decided that it knows how best to redirect my typos - right to a Verizon yahoo page.

I didn’t ask for this nor do I want it. It wasn’t clear in any TOS that I saw, but may be in there.

This is why we have class action lawsuits. If Verizon wants tort reform they should understand that this is violation of my privacy and all kinds of other things.

Net Neutrality is under attack. Hope the FCC or somebody does something.

Conversation Feeds

Posted on February 25, 2008
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Dennis McDonald writes about Speedbumps on the Way to Creating a Blog Based Micro-Community. He describes how he and another blogger tried to create a conversation across two blogs and then integrate the posts and comments into one single conversation supported by a feed.

He wants what I call a conversation feed. I bought the domain a year or two ago with the idea of putting something like this together. Maybe it’s time to dust off that project and give it a try.

Social Capital - The benefits of participation

Posted on February 25, 2008
Filed Under Community | 1 Comment

Tara Hunt has an excellent post on Social Capital over at Horse.Pig.Cow.

the key to attracting and keeping members of a community is to offer them heaps of ways to accrue Social Capital within it. That is, to offer them more connections, more influence, more of a chance to grow their reputation, more bridging capital, more bonding capital, more access and potential access to ideas, talent and resources, more ways to display their accomplishments, more ways to do nice things for others (to build up those favors) and more access to those with loads of Social Capital of their own.

If social capital is the benefit of participation, we can compare it to the cost of participation and map the formula for community success.

Social Capital Created - Cost to participate = Community Success

We Are The Ultimate Teflon Candidate

Posted on February 17, 2008
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TechPresident has an excellent set of observations about the brand building happening with the Obama campaign. In The Marketing of the President 2008 - they point out that the focus is not so much on Obama as it is on Hope and Change.

The Obama campaign is not selling Obama. It is not selling a public figure with progressive political beliefs. It is selling Hope — and Change.

And JD Lasica puts it well with his observation:

Fascinating, and absolutely dead on. Those who believe that there’s something duplicitous about “branding” a political campaign are completely missing the point. The Obama campaign is selling an idea, not a candidate. That’s what makes it a movement, not just a typical political campaign.

The thing I would add as an observation is the way Obama constantly turns things from focusing on him to focusing on the collective “us”. Yes We Can. He might not have the experience, but We do. He’s not going to be the change, We are going to be the change. He’s not the one we’ve been waiting for, We are the ones we have been waiting for! It goes on and on like this.

Every criticism gets deflected from him to us. It makes it very hard to challenge him, because any criticism ends up being directed not at him, but at the collective us. And criticism of us is not going to fly.

Talk about a teflon candidate - this is kind of incredible.

Whatever your politics, you have to give the Campaign credit for being one of the most effective marketing machines we’ve ever seen. The question becomes can that be translated into the running the country effectively? (oh sorry, I forgot, it’s not about whether he can do it, because We can do that)

More evidence that Obama represents something big

Posted on February 10, 2008
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I got involved with Twitter this weekend - I was surprised to find it engaging. I saw this on their blog.

Obama on Twitter

Seems to me that Obama represents something big. (BTW - I did vote for him because I think we don’t need more Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton legacy going on. Hillary has brains and drive, but what would be next - Jeb then Chelsea? America does not need a monarchy system. BTW2 - I think JM deserves huge respect for taking stances and doing things and will be competitive for my vote)

This is becoming a movement

Posted on February 10, 2008
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We are the ones we have been waiting for!

Posted on February 5, 2008
Filed Under Opinion | 1 Comment

Barack Obama may have tied Hillary Clinton in the votes and in the delegate count, but it seems to me that is a victory for his campaign. He had a great line in his speech that played to the idea that it’s not him, but us:

We are the ones we have been waiting for!

Powerful stuff and I’m sure this will sell some books for this lady. I wonder if that’s where they got the quote. If they did they should have given her credit.

.

Must have toy!

Posted on January 22, 2008
Filed Under Opinion, Technology | Leave a Comment

Introducing Ta.gg

Posted on January 20, 2008
Filed Under General, Rails | Leave a Comment

TaggI just put the finishing touches on a beta version of Ta.gg. Ta.gg is a short URL service that takes long URLs and turns them into short URLs.

I choose the domain because it is the shortest domain I could find when spelled on a standard cell phone key pad. On my Razr, spelling ta.gg takes only 5 keystrokes (82144). Other services take many more keystrokes to spell. For example, TinyURL.com takes 24 keystrokes to spell.

I also added functionality so that you can add keyword tags to your Ta.gg which should make it easy to find interesting links.

I made a bunch of short cuts people can play with:

And a bookmark tool to make it easy to make Ta.ggs. Simply add the link below to your browser favorites/bookmarks:
Ta.gg It!
and click it everytime you stumble across a URL you need to Ta.gg.

It’s built on Rails, so it will be interesting to see how it scales.

If you give it a try, let me know what you think.

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