blog.payne.org

Google’s rumored to be updating their page ranking again.   They adjust rankings from time to time to improve search results and make it harder to game the ranking system.

These updates illustrate the problem of depending on organic traffic (e.g. clicks generated from showing up in the search results) vs paid ad links.  You can do a great “search engine optimization” (SEO) job and get ranked #1 when you search for “fios battery“, but then Google can change everything and you drop to #7.   Clicks will drop off accordingly.

I’m usually skeptical of business plans that depend heavily on organic traffic.  Organic traffic should be viewed as “icing” — great if you can get it, but not critical for the business to work.

Why do we need electronic voting machines, really?

When we started Open Market in 1994 and built one of the first eCommerce systems, we realized we might be opening pandora’s box for fraud.  At that time, you could steal all of the off-line credit card numbers you wanted, with surreptitious swipes, receipts (before XXX7307 was printed), etc.

The problem is the Internet enables anonymous, scalable, and transferable fraud.  Attacks are effectively anonymous because they’re impossible to trace.  Automation makes stealing 10,000 cards as easy as 1.  And transferability lets one attacker develop an attack, and give it to 1,000 others (often with less skill, like script kiddies).  (Compare this to lock-picking:  difficult to do without being physically present, difficult to pick extra locks, and hard to teach someone else to do.)

Pure electronic voting introduces these same problems, without the corresponding benefits.  Elections are infrequently occurring events, with high stakes and incentives to tamper.

What’s wrong with optically scanned paper ballots?  Machines can help with counting, but there’s always a way to verify.

MP3’s took off when the average user bandwidth had advanced to the point where you could download (or stream) a 3MB file in some “reasonable” amount of time.

And video has taken off for the same reason, as the same bandwidth cross-over has happened for video data types.  And more widespread use of HD video is coming soon.

Access bandwidth continues to advance:  what data type is next?

I did our Christmas cards with VistaPrint this year, and they came out perfect.  I did a custom layout (front and inside) using their PhotoShop templates, and the print quality was excellent (what print technology do they use?).  I highly recommend them.

But it got me thinking:  VistaPrint is using the Internet to streamline the printing of paper, while the Internet will eventually make many uses of paper obsolete.

It all seems so recursively counterintuitive.

I bought a Chumby to play with — I don’t quite get it.  Yet.

It’s an alarm-clock sized device, with a color touch LCD display.  It displays Flash widgets you select in a continuous cycle, typically for 20-30 seconds per widget.  My widget set:  clock, weather widget, stock quote widget, and a few others.  Widgets can be interactive, using the touch screen for input.  You configure things on the Web, and the device downloads the config.

I was attracted to the openness:  full source code, etc.  I have a few ideas for displaying info from my home phone switch, my alarm system, etc.

But as configured, its sort of like a tiny version of the business waiting room display or Captivate displays in elevators, cycling through “stuff” to keep me occupied while I wait.  But in my home or office, that use isn’t  helpful.

Maybe I’m missing something?  More thinking required.

My son bought an iPod Touch today.  If Apple were to add an earpiece and microphone, they’d have all the hardware needed to be a Wifi VOIP phone.

So close!

If you’re a regular blog reader, it’s easy to use your reader as a topic tracker.  You can do any Google News or Google Blog search and subscribe to the results as an RSS feed.  Some readers (such as BlogBridge) have the built-in ability to construct these “smart feeds”.

I use this method to track a long list of interest topics:  news about companies I’ve invested in, competitors, people I work with, etc.  It’s a very efficient way to cover a range of topics.

We’ve got a pretty busy family with lots of moving parts:  three kids, cars, houses, doctors, parents, cats, etc.

We use a private Wiki to keep the collective family notes, and it’s working really well.  It’s accessible from anywhere (access controlled), and we put just about everything in it, including:  kid’s teacher’s name and email, account info & contacts, neighbor info and contacts, my son’s girlfriend’s cell phone #, frequent flyer numbers, notes we need to keep track of for next year’s tax return, the secret number at the power company you can call when the power gets flaky in our town, recipes, genealogy links, contact info for neighbors in NH, etc.

We avoid identifying account info (numbers, social security, birthdays, etc.) in the event it is compromised.  It’s searchable, and it works really well.  If you have a busy family, I strongly recommend it (even my non-tech wife uses it).

(I self-host, but for most folks, I would recommend PBwiki).

VentureBeat is doing a new experiment, linking from their site to VC firm reviews on The Funded.

I’m fascinated by The Funded and the fact that it even exists.  Has venture capital become such as commodity (e.g. in terms of the large number of VC professionals, amount of money available, etc.) that it can support a full-time review site?  Yikes!

One way to discover new blogs is to read shared links from other bloggers. When you find an article you like, go visit the blog.

For example, I find a lot of new blogs from Scoble’s shared links feed.