June 29, 2004
Under Construction
I'm in the middle of upgrading to MovableType 3.0, and so things may be a little funky around here for a day or two. Those of you longing for that picture of me on the beach -- or the woefully out of date sidebar information -- will have to entertain yourselves some other way for a while.
Posted by sberlin at 10:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
June 28, 2004
The Rest Is Noizzz!
I've known Alex Ross for more than two decades, dating back to the high school we both went to in Washington, D.C. (One of my first memories of him is not being quite nerd-cool enough to get into a regular game of Diplomacy that he and a few friends would put together on weekends -- oh, the crushing blows of being fifteen!) Ironically, it took us going off to different colleges for our friendship to bloom, and since then we've been having ongoing debates about the cultural merits of Madonna, CSPAN's political coverage, Radiohead and Pavement and The Smiths, not to mention all the strange folks from high school years that we occasionally stumble across. He wrote a wonderful extended essay on New Zealand indie rock in the very first "issue" of FEED, but is probably better known for being the New Yorker's music critic -- or I should say, "a" New Yorker music critic, now that Sasha Frere-Jones has jumped into the fray.
At any rate, I say all this to alert you to the fact that Alex now has a blog, The Rest Is Noise. I love Alex's NYer writing, but as so often the case with blogs, I think his site captures a bit more of his whole personality -- the intellect and wonderful prose, sure, but also the eclecticism of his tastes, and his humor. Check it out.
Posted by sberlin at 03:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
June 22, 2004
When Is A Golf Course Unfair?
Greetings, blog readers. You may have wondered where I disappeared to. The truth is I've been on vacation for the past week on Martha's Vineyard, and before that it was a crazy rush of birthdays and pre-vacation packing. (It was my 36th on June 6, followed almost immediately by my wife's, and our now one-year-old son's.) But we're back in Brooklyn for a long stretch, and posting should now continue at its usual erratic pace.
A quick word about the controversy over the U.S. Open this past weekend. For those of you who follow this sort of thing, there's been a flareup over the difficult conditions created by the USGA at the brilliant Shinnecock Hills course where the Open was played -- mostly concerning the greens, which were by Sunday as slick as a ballroom floor apparently. As the Times reports today, the scoring average on Sunday was a full eight strokes over par, significantly higher than any major championship in recent memory -- though the overall average for the week was still lower than at Bethpage two years ago. This quote from Tiger Woods was representative of the players' complaints: "There's nothing wrong with it being hard and difficult. But just don't make it so it's out of control unfair."
I bring all this up because I think it raises an interesting question about what it means for a course to be "unfair." Assuming everyone is playing under the same conditions, shouldn't any level of difficulty be fair? It might be a little tedious to watch players hacking away on every hole, but there wouldn't be anything inequitable about the conditions. (Granted, there was some dispute about the watering of the 7th green, which apparently benefited some players and not others, but that's the only hole whether there was any question of giving some players breaks and not others.)
In my mind, the debate shouldn't be about unfairness. It should be about randomness. There is a certain point of difficulty where the course stops distinguishing between good shots and bad shots, and thus fails to reward players who are performing well relative to their peers. Imagine a course set up like a pinball machine, where balls land in the fairway and then bounce fifty feet in the air in random directions. Winning in those conditions would be a matter of pure luck -- the score would simply be a register of who got the luckiest bounces.
I think it's this randomizing effect that the players are intuitively talking about when they talk about the layout being unfair. The problem is, the evidence doesn't really suggest that the layout is any more randomizing than your average tournament. In fact, I'd suggest just the opposite. The easiest measure of this is whether the best players on average end up doing well in the tournament; tournaments where high-ranking players tend to cluster at the top are less randomizing than tournaments where you have low-ranking players disproportionately represented at the top of the leaderboard. In fact, you could easily create a statistic that would measure this: the extent to which the final leaderboard deviates from the world rankings. Call that number the R factor: layouts that possess high R factors -- where a lot of low-ranking players out-perform the top pros -- don't let quality play rise to the top, while low R factor layouts separate the wheat from the chaff. You could use this number to determine the ideal conditions for rewarding quality play; you'd analyze all the tournaments and whichever venue turns the lowest R factor -- that's your model for the ideal tournament.
From eyeballing the scores from the past five opens, it's hard to believe that the Open -- despite its allegedly "unfair" layout -- doesn't have an unusually low R factor, given the quality of the players in the top ten each year. The reason Woods, Mickleson, Singh, Els, Goosen, et al show up again and again in the top fives for the Open is because the layouts reward solid play and experience, despite their difficulty. There's nothing unfair about that.
Posted by sberlin at 10:17 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
June 03, 2004
TiVo's Weight Problem
Seeing this rumor item on the next generation iPod reminded me of a question that's been nagging at me for the past month or so: why is TiVo so big? I'm in the market to buy one of those Series Two TiVos for our main home theater setup, but I simply don't have the room for another box right now, given the amp, the two DVD players, the XBox, and the cable tuner already stacked on top of each other. I do, however, have room for another iPod. If Apple can make media-playing device with a 40 gig hard drive that's smaller than a pack of cards, why is a 40 gig Tivo still the size of two shoeboxes? Seriously, I'd like an answer. I know you need room for a bunch of different i/o options in the back (phone, USB, S-Video, RGB, audio, ethernet), but couldn't you do something clever to minimize that real estate -- perhaps create some kind of single universal plug and then let people buy the adapters they need to connect to it? My current Series One TiVo is bigger than the VCR I bought in 1990. What's up with that?
Posted by sberlin at 09:49 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)
June 02, 2004
Bloggers Save The World!
My buddy Jeff Jarvis alerted me to the laudable Spirit of America site, which has already been widely linked to through the blogworld, but every link counts, so here's mine. It's a fascinating model for combining long-distance philanthropy with targeted interventions. I won't bother going through the details since they're nicely summarized here. But the site makes me wonder whether this isn't the beginning of a fascinating new chapter in the web's gift economy. Thanks to the passion of the bloggers themselves, and clustering technologies like Technorati and Blogdex, we've already mastered the art of locating and quickly swarming around the week's hot news item or thinkpiece. (You know the drill: Clay posts a provocative essay about power laws on Monday, and by Friday there are fifty in-depth responses, a dozen fact checks, ten suggestions for future research, and a handful of requests for the Lazy Web.) What Spirit Of America suggests is a version of that swarming directed towards Good Causes: someone halfway across the globe (or halfway across the country, or the county) puts out a call for help setting up a wi-fi network in an under-funded school, or repairing a sewage treatment facility, and within five days they're flooded with funds, spare parts, technical expertise, and good will. And when the network goes online, or the sewage starts getting processed again, we all get to see the results. (Maybe not so fun for sewage, but you get the idea.) And then we get to move on to the next cause.
Posted by sberlin at 11:09 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (1)
May 28, 2004
A Love Song To Curbed
I'm still a huge fan of all the sites in the Nick Denton's nanopublishing empire, but I have to say the themed weblog that has resonated with my interests the most over the past year is a brand new one that comes from outside the Denton fold: Curbed, which is focused exclusively on urban planning and real estate in the New York area, and mostly in Manhattan and Brooklyn. So there's a mix of interesting new real estate listings (the old FEED office was just profiled in its incarnation a new upscale residential condo); links to news about various urban projects, like a new Chelsea pier or the Queens Olympic village; and entertaining city-themed blurbs grabbed from Craigslist or other blogs.
Curbed fills a hole that I've long wanted someone to fill. Gawker has always had a little of this real estate focus, but the dominant thread there is now gossip. The Metro section in the Times invariably has a couple stories that are the most interesting ones to me in the entire paper (usually about Ground Zero or the Ranter Brooklyn development) but everything else in Metro is skull-crushingly boring. Curbed has a nice edge to it, but mostly it just seems incredibly informative. Already, after just a week's worth of reading, I feel confident that if there's something interesting happening in terms of urban development in the city, I'll hear about it via Curbed.
I think that kind of micro-coverage is one of the great things that these thematically organized blogs provide. It used to be that you could feel confident that you were on top of major news -- or sports or financial stories -- if you read the Times on a daily basis, but your micro interests were harder to keep track of with the same regularity. I remember how hard it was to find out information about Apple before the web -- you'd have to wait for MacWorld and Macweek to come out, and even then they weren't always focused on my particular sub-interests. I knew I was missing information. But now take a micro category like Mac-based audio software: I feel completely confident that if anything happens in that category -- new upgrades, announcements, reviews -- I'll see it via one of the 2-3 blogs that I follow. Same goes for political polls and analysis thanks to DonkeyRising, and DC political chatter thanks to Wonkette, and now urban developments in NYC thanks to Curbed.
One suggestion I have for Curbed: there are already a bunch of tools out there on the various real estate sites for getting automatic notifications of new properties on the market in a specific category: Park Slope 2 Bedroom for less than 800K, etc. That's useful for people who are actively looking for a new space. But there are a lot of us who aren't actively looking, but like to follow the market and don't have time to sift through all the new listings, and don't need a hyper-specific filter. So I would love a feature that pointed me to the most interesting new Brooklyn townhouse on the market each day. I could imagine comparable features for downtown lofts, and uptown apartments/townhouses. If the categories were broad enough, it wouldn't take that much time for put together the collection for each day. Think of it as the Curbed version of Gawker's summaries of the gossip pages: we read the real estate section so you don't have to!
Posted by sberlin at 10:50 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack (1)
May 24, 2004
Exposé and Safari
Like many OS X users, I've grown completely dependent on the miniature-window navigation of Exposé; I suspect I still click the mouse more than I hit those Exposé function keys, but it's a remarkably close call. Now that I'm hooked, I'm finding myself wanting to Exposize other parts of the UI -- particularly my recent browsing history. Hitting f10 already lets me see all my open windows in Safari, but most of my surfing through the day happens in a single window, with one page replacing the next. I'm constantly pulling down the "history" menu item and scrolling through literally dozens of names to find a page I pulled up a few hours ago. The Exposé approach would be much easier: hit another key, and Safari instantly shows me all the pages I've visited in the past 24 hours, sized to fit on my screen. To make this more manageable, it would make sense to have an option to show only one page per domain name, since I'll often surf through a dozen pages from a single site that are visually indistinguishable from one another.
Knowing Apple's track record of delivering exactly what I've been looking for in new releases, they're probably about to announce this feature in Tiger next month. Can't wait.
PS. Note the number of links in the previous paragraph. A while I ago I begged the LazyWeb to come up with a URL posted tool that would let me quickly grab URLs from my recent history and past them as formatted HTML links into another application. I'm happy to say that I found exactly what I was looking for: the program URL Manager Pro, which seems to have a lot of other useful features as well.
Posted by sberlin at 12:07 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack (1)
May 21, 2004
Back To The Future
Reading this Reuters report on Bill Gates' public embrace of blogs as a business tool took me back down memory lane -- and into a few folders on my hard drive that I haven't visited for a while. Here's the first two paragraphs of the story:
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates often takes the stage to talk about the future of software technology, but on Thursday he also told top corporate executives that Weblogs and the way they are distributed can be used as business communication tools.
"What blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to communicate," Gates told executives gathered at Microsoft's headquarters for its annual CEO Summit.
This brought a smile to my face, because it reminded me of a few months that I spent -- along with a few fellow soldiers -- trying to make the case for this use of weblogs, back in early 2001 when I was still doing FEED and Plastic at our wonderful, but short-lived company Automatic Media. I haven't talked about this period much, partially because it's a bit of a blur: we were running out of money at a steady clip, and I was writing Emergence at night. But it's fun now to look back on it, given what's happened since.
Basically, we'd launched Plastic.com in January 2001 based on a mod of the Slashdot tools, and confronted an utterly dead advertising market, thus cutting off the one initial revenue stream we'd been hoping for. But we'd grown convinced that the group and solo weblog format was an incredibly powerful one, and one that could be used for more than just pop culture riffing, as we were doing on Plastic. (One of our board members who had also seen the light turned out to be Uber-Blogger Jeff Jarvis, who was back then merely a lowly President of an entire division of the Newhouse publishing empire.) So we decided to try to transform the company into a, gulp, enterprise software company, where we would go around and do custom builds of weblog tools for firms to better manage their internal information flow. Of course, 99.9% of these businesses had no idea what a weblog was, and we only had about two months of cash left to make the transition. But it was a valiant effort, if ultimately a futile one.
I went back and found one of the documents from that period. Here's the language we'd put together:
Enterprise clients using the Plastic platform can:
• Allow employees to efficiently manage, navigate and enhance the collective knowledge base of the company
• Organize the company’s collective intelligence using the platform’s intuitive, customizable information-architecture options
• Allow employees to rate content (industry news, sales strategies, etc.) according to relevance, ratings that are available to all employees
• Empower employees with a set of communication tools that facilitate ongoing discussion of the company’s stored knowledge
It's nice to think that we were on the right track back then, even if we were about three years too early. But I have to say, part of me is glad we didn't get a chance to prove the model. It would have taken two years of hand-to-mouth financing before the business environment got ready to understand what we were saying, and I'm honestly not sure if I was cut out to be an enterprise software salesman. Much more fun to be hanging out in Brooklyn with my kids and writing books all day.
Posted by sberlin at 11:44 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (1)