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I see things on Digg sometimes about how blog networks are "gaming" digg. That is, how a blog network with a decent number of writers pass requests to one another to digg each others' stories.

Is it wrong to digg friends' stories? If it is, why does the "friend" feature exist at all? After all, Digg's top users get to be the top users by making friends. Friends digg other friends' material. This is the nature of a "social" web — that is, Web 2.0.

Is it spamming? The applicable definition of spamming from the Oxford American Dictionary is the following:

spam |spam|
noun
2 irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the Internet to a large number of recipients.

If the topics dugg by blog network writers are genuine articles, and garner lots more, non-blog-network diggs once they hit the magical Digg Front Page Tipping Point™, is it even an issue?

I would argue that if and when a story reaches the front page and starts getting hundreds or even thousands of diggs, the point is rendered moot. The premise behind Digg is that The People determine what's important and worthy of notice. If something is effectively spammed to the front page, the Will of The People should bury it if it sucks.

If it's not buried, then Digg is fundamentally flawed. It means that groupthink rules Digg, and that Digg isn't truly democratic. It means that Digg is simply a popularity contest, and once you've made it, you're set and the content you bring with you doesn't really matter.

And that's exactly what Digg is: a popularity contest. Content is irrelevant — so long as you don't suck entirely — once you hit the Big Time. But it's a popularity contest worth entering because it can mean tens of thousands of new eyeballs, which of course means advertising revenue.

Is it wrong? Is it unethical? Probably not — most of my friends online are through Ars Technica. I've written for Ars in the past, I digg stories from Ars, but I wouldn't digg them if I didn't think they were worthwhile. As such, it has a good reputation, and its content is stellar, so why not digg Ars articles?

Does that mean I'm "gaming" Digg by digging my friends' — who are writers for Ars — stories? If this is "gaming," then why has Digg made it possible for users to add "Digg this" links to their website? Why hasn't Digg issued a Cease and Desist order to Feedburner for their "digg this" RSS feature? Or are these things only ethical when site operators use them unsuccessfully? Is it crabs in a bucket? Sounds like it to me.

Ultimately, I don't really care one way or the other. I just think the allegations of unethical behavior going around are absurd. Marketing is part of being a big-time website operator, and Digg is the perfect marketing tool. Especially if your product or content doesn't suck and appeals to a wide audience. Which defines most blog networks: they wouldn't be in existence unless they were making enough money to support themselves, which means they need enough readers, so obviously someone finds them valuable.

Digg, Blogging, blog networks, web 2.0, AOL, Calacanis

I think the last time I actually bothered to check my Internet connection speeds was 2002. "Fast enough" was always the way I thought about it. Anyway, after seeing links to speedtest.net on del.icio.us/popular and a CNet blog, I figured it must be slick.

And it is.

But at the end of the day, it's still just an Internet speed test…

I spend most of my time in northern Massachusetts and Southern New Hampshire. There are an inordinate number of vanity plates around here, particularly from the State of NH. I have one, actually. They're cheap, and they're easy to get. (You can order them online.) I've heard some people — particularly people from other regions of the country — make fun of people with vanity plates in NH. They've never seen so many in one place.

There's a reason for that. New Hampshire has a relatively small population compared to Massachusetts and New York — 1.24 million, putting it at 41st in the Union — and where do most of these people live?*

In Southern New Hampshire. The northern regions are relatively unpopulated.

The Oxford English Dictionary places the number of words in the English language at ~500,000. Some of these are longer than 7 letters, but they can be abbreviated or shortened. Words can also be spelled by substituting numbers for letters as well. (l33t-speak) Zeroes cannot be used because they can be confused with the letter O.

So for simplicity's sake, we'll say there are 500,000 desirable letter-number combinations. (There are actually closer to 6.1 billion — 25^7 — but only a tiny fraction are desirable.) Figure that the 80% of the population is concentrated in the southernmost 50 miles of the state, and it's easy to see why you see so many vanity plates in southern New Hampshire. It's not that the absolute number of plates is higher than, say, New York, it's just that they're all in one place.

*For reference, Essex and Suffolk county (Boston and Metro North) have a combined population of ~1.3 million people.

License plates, vanity plates, New Hampshire, math

Lifehacker is running an Ask The Reader column wherein the question is "What's your favorite software ever?" I consider software anything that runs on a computer (locally or remotely), big or small. That means an OS is one piece of software (even though it technically isn't).

I've got a few "favorites." I don't know that I could narrow it down to just one. If I could, it would probably be
Google search. That said, let's move on to the list:

Mac OS X

Since the Intel hardware has made it's debut, I've own 3 Intel-powered Macs. In as many months(!). First the iMac, then the MacBook, and now just the MacBook Pro. I don't regret my decision at all. The only things I'm sort of waiting for are the Universal Binaries of Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat.

Firefox

I'm pretty browser-agnostic. On a daily basis I use Opera, Firefox, Safari, and NetNewsWire (Webkit browsing sans Javascript).

Firefox is extensible, it's theme-able. I bet someone could write an extension to have it start my coffee in the morning when I wake my computer from sleep mode. That said, I like it better on Windows and Linux than OS X. It's fast enough on OS X, but not like it is on the other two OSes. On OS X, I use it when I'm going to be doing heavy browsing — that is, not opening my browser for 15 seconds to check XYZ.

iTunes

I started using iTunes years ago on Windows when it first came out. iTunes is what caused me to buy an iPod, which is probably one my favorite gadgets ever. I liked it on Windows well enough, and I love it on the Mac. As a stats junky, the playcounts are essential to me. I don't know how I lived without them, and sometimes I catch myself wondering how many times I've played a certain song or album — I've lost thousands of song plays due to serious Windows crashes (mostly related to my experiments in overclocking…). The iPod increments these playcounts as well, which is totally awesome.

(Now I have iTunes configured with last.fm so all of my tracks are recorded on someone's else server so I don't have to worry about it… (Which is a reason I moved to Gmail as well.)

NetNewsWire + NewsGator subscription

I liked RSS Bandit on Windows, but I love NNW + NewsGator. Back when I juggled a desktop and a laptop, it was particularly nice to keep my RSS read/unread subscriptions synced up. The webkit browser minus Javascript support is super fast as well, and because it's Webkit-based, I can copy and paste into Pages and have it preserve the formatting. (I do most of my reading offline.)

Quicksilver

An amazing application for OS X. I use it for it's most basic functionality (mostly application launching) and I feel lost whenever I use a Mac that doesn't have it. It's like the Windows "Run" dialog on steroids.

Google web services/applications

I touched on this yesterday. I should probably give the full list of the Google applications I use regularly, if I can remember them all — my favorites are italicized:

Google search, Gmail, Calendar, Analytics, Browser Extension (Firefox), Notebook, Maps, News, Video, Personalized Home, Scholar, Blog Search, Earth, Finance, Froogle, Image Search, Toolbar (Firefox), AdSense, Calculator/Conversions, Search History, Spreadsheets, Writely.

Holy crap, that's 22 web services/applications. Apparently all my data are belong to Google. Strangely enough, though, I wouldn't call myself a Google fanboy, though I do find them an immensely interesting company. It's just easier to have all of my data in one place…

But still, wow.

Quake 3
What can I say? I still love a good old-fashioned Quake 3 CTF or Deathmatch. Preferably in a rail arena.

WordPress

Amazing web publishing software. Really, there's nothing I can say about it except that it completely and totally rules. It seems to scale pretty well, too.

BOINC

I'm a distributed computing junky. BOINC is the best framework I've ever used. It's actually better than Distributed.net. (The mind boggles, I know.)

IrfanView

I wish there was an image editor like this for the Mac. iPhoto can do a lot of the same stuff, but it's clunky. IrfanView was slim and fast. If anyone has any Mac suggestions, I'm all ears.

EditPlus

An old friend from high school, and still my text editor of choice on Windows. Probably the first piece of software I actually bought a license for, even though I technically didn't need to.

Conclusions

So there it is. The list. As you can see, I'm not a big gamer. And most of my favorite applications that I use regularly are Mac apps. I don't think there's anything inherently better in a Mac app, but I do enjoy the Mac user interface more than I like Windows. It's prettier, and I like pretty. Windows is functional, but it's just a little too uninspired for my tastes. And Luna just feels like Fisher Price.

Anyway, there's my list. What're some of your favorite applications that you use regularly, or used to use a long time ago? (Oregon Trail, anyone? ;))

Recently I read an article in Business Week about Google ("So Much Fanfare, So Few Hits") and I found myself agreeing with the premise that Google certainly does release lots of new products and services — none of them as popular as their main site — but each probably gets a ton of traffic by themselves. So relative to www.google.com, they're tiny, but when the comparison is not made, they could be huge.

But these comparisons are ultimately superfluous. Allow me to explain…

Much ado is made about Google's 80/20 time. You've all heard about it: 20% of a person's time may be spent on personal projects of their choice. Google News, Gmail, and several other popular Google products came out of this 20%. The 20% keeps engineers happy by allowing them to work outside their primary focus, and it gives Google some new products.

A visit to Google Labs shows off some 12 "graduates." and many more still in-progress. Probably all of them cooked up in that 20% time.

I don't use all of Google's services — I have no use for all of them — but I do use a fair number. Gmail, AdSense, Google Scholar, Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Calendar, etc. to name a few. I find it easy to remember URLs, but not everyone else does, which could be why their secondary services don't gain the traction they otherwise might: Google doesn't really advertise their new products and services outside a limited scope (their blog which filters to the MSM and blogosphere in general). And we all know how long the Internet's collective attention span is…

Froogle and Google News are the notable exceptions. I think Google will try to solve their traction problem in the next 12 months: they're already beginning to integrate some services that you've already signed up for into your Gmail account. (Look in the upper left.) A rotating "Have you tried Google Blah lately?" that advertises Google services on the side of their home page might do wonders for increasing visibility without decreasing whitespace too much.

Why doesn't a high failure rate matter? Because the projects cost very little capital investment to create — they were created in engineers' spare time — and because of what Eric Schmidt considers one of their greatest physical assets as a company: their massive grid computer. Google has several hundred thousand computers working for them — the exact number is highly contentious and secret outside Google — set up in such a manner where if one fails, it is replaced and the rest of the grid picks up the slack.

It doesn't matter what you run on top of the platform once it's in place. That's why Google can keep throwing service after service onto the pile and it doesn't matter if most of them fail because the cost of maintaining them is negligible: the grid is running whether Google Product du Jour running on top of it or not. With plenty of capacity, there's no compelling reason not to keep adding to the list of products and services: users will cherry pick their services of choice.

Google remains an interesting company, if for no other reason than they let products thrive (Gmail) or wither (Orkut) on their own merit. Google doesn't need to start turning off services yet because their data center capacity is growing faster than their computing needs. They also don't need to worry about paying dividends on their common stock, which allows them to use their money more aggressively: they don't need to share it with investors. (Remember what happened when Microsoft said they would be spending more in R&D than analysts expected?)

Could you really see Microsoft letting the whims of its engineers dictate new products? That seems to be the difference between top-down vs. bottom-up management. Admittedly, I don't know much about the management culture inside Microsoft, aside from what I read in the press, so I could be completely off-base here. But I doubt it. When was the last time you saw a Microsoft product come to light that upper management didn't invest millions to make successful?

Now compare that to Google which uses the inherent public interest in their company coupled with PR in the form of their official blog to launch their new services. No expensive PR firms required. Some stick, some don't. Most are pretty good. In aggregate, no other company in the world has the array of web services that Google does. Not all of them are best-of-breed, but for people like me who would rather have a one-stop shopping approach linked under one account, they don't need to be: They just need to be good enough.

Further reading: AT&T Labs vs. Google Labs: not your grandfather's R&D

If you enjoyed this post, please digg it or Bookmark it on del.icio.us or vote for it on Netscape

Google, R&D, Web 2.0, web services, Microsoft

So in my last entry I lamented my blog template, and how I didn't like it. So I've changed to ShadedGrey*, and it's quite nice. Naturally I made my own modifications and such (AdSense, changing the order and appearance of the sidebar, etc.).

I also hooked myself up to feedburner for vanity reasons (read: so I don't have to dig into my logs to see how many RSS readers I might have.) The count should be accurate within 24 hours. I can assure you I don't have 0 readers. :p

How do you like the new look?

* I'd hate on the dude for not knowing how to spell "gray" but he's looks as though he's from the Asian subcontinent and he might speak The King's English. And the template's pretty nice as well, so I'll let it slide…

SoftWhite looked nice for a while, but now I can't stand it. I've got my eye on another template that I think I'll be using in the next few days. My only complaint about the new one is that it's so narrow.

Why is every blog template on the planet so bloody narrow? Most people run resolutions of 1024×768 — why don't template designers take advantage? The bonus with wider templates is that you can actually include images and screenshots that you can actually see. 1020 is not so wide as to be unreadable, and not so narrow that an entry scrolls for pages and pages.

And what's with all the tiny text on blogs? You'll never see a professionally-designed blog template with fonts so tiny you have to squint. That violates the basic principles behind accessability and readability.

I wish the amateurs would learn this, because I can't afford a professional*. :p

* Yet.

Blogs, web design, blogging, readability, accessibility

And replaced both of them with a MacBook Pro.

I BTO a MacBook Pro to replace both of them. It annoyed me having two computers — one of which was barely used at all — when there was a model that offered the portability of the MacBook with the power of the iMac. So I ordered a 15" MacBook Pro with the 2.0GHz Core Duo, 128MB video card, and 7400rpm 100GB hard drive. It arrived faster than expected, and frankly, kicks ass.

I also snagged myself a lovely little iCurve for when it's sitting on my desk, and a MacAlly IceKEY which is a lovely little keyboard. I'm one of those weird people that likes laptop keyboards, and I'd played with one of these a few years ago. It's very nice, and the keys aren't soft and squishy like the regular Apple keyboard. It actually reminds me of typing on my MacBook (whose keyboard is one of the nicest I've used bar none).

Still using my trust MS Intellimouse that I've had since forever.

Migrating from the iMac to the MacBook Pro

The only unpleasant part of the experience of moving from the iMac to the MBP was having to buy a Firewire 400 cable. That sucked a lot, because I had to buy it from the Apple store at the mall, because Radio Shack didn't carry them(!), and I didn't want to order it online, because that would have been stupid, and I'd have to wait for it to be shipped.

Other than that, the process was a breeze. My administrator settings, passwords, applications, etc. were all ported over without a hitch. My music, my ratings, playlists, play counts, etc. I was amazed.

It even transferred over my Parallels Windows installation! (In the interest of full disclosure, I did have to re-install parallels, but it picked up the partition with no problem, and I didn't have to re-enter my serial number or anything like that. It was literally run the installer -> done. Impressive.)

The MacBook was always just my "bang-around" computer. I'd type documents and stuff on there — usually blog entries. I think I had maybe 10MB of stuff I wanted to save from there, so I just zipped it up and uploaded it to my server.

Both computers are all formatted and ready to be sold. They're both sitting in their original Apple boxes, all nicely packaged up and ready to go. I plan to list them on Craigslist shortly. When I ordered my MBP, I took advantage of Apple's back-to-school deal where you get a free iPod nano after a mail-in rebate. As soon as the paperwork arrives, I'll submit the rebate and sell the nano as well since I've already got a 60GB iPod Photo.

Less money, less overhead

I'm a casual computer user. I'm not a programmer or a "power" user anymore. Most of my computer time is spent reading or pounding out a blog entry or four. Sure, I know more than your average bear about OS X and Windows, but that's all incidental knowledge I gained elsewhere and asking "I wonder if I can do Z?" and then looking or asking for the answer. Consequently, I no longer need multiple computers. The 100GB drive is enough to hold all of my music, and it's fast enough to be a system drive. (5400rpm = omg slow.) I've got a 400GB external drive for all of my watchable media: movies, TV shows, random Internet crap, etc.

By selling the iMac and the MacBook, I will likely recoup $400 — and yet still have the same effective functionality without the ocassional hassle of wanting to move something from one computer to another. It's also less mental overhead. There's less junk on my desk, fewer possessions to keep track of, and I've got a "portable" office if I want. The main benefit is recouping some of the cost, and having that decreased mental overhead.

I get more done when there's less junk in my life because I can concentrate easier.

Pictures:

The lighting looks a little wonky, but that's just the way it photographs. It's actually very nice sitting here at just about any time of the day. During the morning and early afternoon, I don't need my desk light because the sun lights up my room quite nicely, but there's never any glare on my screen. It's quite excellent. On cooler days, I open the window and put the fan in because I prefer non-air-conditioned air. Unfortunately it's about 91 outside, and the humidity is oppressive…

Left side where I do my studying. (Daylight rules!)
Right side where I conquer the worlddo most of my work. (I even have space to work thanks to the <3 iCurve!)

The whole shebang:

Apple, Macintosh, , MacBook, MacBook Pro, iMac, iCurve, productivity, gtd

Time for another OTP zeitgeist. (June's can be found here.) It's been 2 full months of writing for fun and profit. This month went by particularly quickly — I've got more on my plate in terms of responsibilities, and the "newness" wore off. I don't check my AdSense earnings as religiously as I did in June. (Incidentally, if you are a Mac OS X Tiger user, this widget is quite nice if you just want an overall look at how you're doing.) I think think that was a particular factor in making the month seem to go by quicker.

Google also rolled out a toolbar PageRank update. I went from 0 to 4. Not as impressive as the 0 to 5 jump that polyscience.org did, but I don't mind. i get much more search engine traffic than polyscience ever did.

June-July comparisons:

Impressions:
June: 13,606
July: 12,042

Clicks:
June: 111
July: 90

Earnings:
June: $28
July: $25

RSS subscribers:
June: 28
July: 55

Goals exceeded:

• I said I wanted 3,000 page impressions for OnThePharm in the month of July. I got 3,629.
• I said I'd like 28 RSS subscribers. For the last 7 days, I've averaged 55.

Goal not met:

• I wanted to hit $35 in AdSense earnings. I didn't meet that for a variety of possible reasons. See below.

Contributing factors

Webhosting

Against my better judgement several months ago, I chose a crappy webhost. It was a tough month for them, and while they're a company that believes in full disclosure, their service has been spectacularly unreliable. If there's one more monumental screwup in the next six months, I'll be moving to MediaTemple who seem to have people that 1) know how to create a reliable network and 2) have servers that are fast. Even for WordPress sites. (OMG!) MediaTemple is in the same building as DreamHost — as is MySpace — but they didn't seem to have the issues that DreamHost has had thanks to their apparent lack of networking and failover expertise.

Mostly I just want a non-suck webhost that doesn't make me bleed money through my eyes. I sort of miss my dedicated server, but as I've posted above, I'm not making bank from my writing. Something tells me I'd be better off picking a datacenter that's NOT located in California. Even without Enron playing games with the power grid, it's still incredibly unreliable. I'd like to find someplace like DirectNIC which stayed up even during Hurricane Katrina with their entire first floor under water.

Misc. other factors

I wonder if my increased RSS readership has anything to do with lower revenues as well. My feeds are fulltext, which means you don't need to visit the site to get all the content. When I hit 100 readers, I'll switch to excerpt-only feeds as a one-month experiment. As I don't get paid for page impressions, I don't know if fulltext is a problem. Regular readers aren't likely to click ads, and since page impressions are up and revenues are down, I suspect some other phenomenon I've yet to discover is going on.

Looking ahead to August

I don't have a clear direction for the month of August. I'm going away for one week towards the end of the month. I'd like to hit $30 this month, which means I'll have to do a little more large-scale promotion than I did this month.

Mostly I'm going to focus on providing good content and seeing what happens with search engine traffic, RSS subscriptions, etc. I'd like to double the number of regular RSS subscribers by the end of the month. I wonder what the limits of my niche (healthcare) are? Is there huge demand for policy and finance (which I tend to focus on)? People seem to love good stories, but I honestly don't have many good stories.

I've got an idea for a controversial post that I'm going to write, but we'll see how long it takes for me to get around writing it. It's about a very real problem that faces patients — particularly terminal patients or those dealing with chronic pain.

Blogging, zeitgeist, RSS, adsense