Archives for August 2008

Marc from BrandLabs and I were talking about business today, and he introduced me to a term called HiPPO. HiPPO stands for “Highest Paid Person’s Opinion” and it’s a great acronym to describe a phenomenon that occurs in a lot of companies. HiPPO occurs when employees are afraid to challenge the ideas of their bosses. […]

I must admit, I’m not a very big Digg user. By the time most stuff gets to the Digg homepage I’ve already read it from it’s original source. It’s part of my job to monitor social media, and as such I see a lot of articles every day. I’m starting to notice an interesting trend […]

I just posted this over on Shoutwire, but I know not all of my readers read that, so here’s the repost: Look America, I love you and all, but you’ve been having a lot of problems lately and I think you need to start making some changes or this relationship isn’t going to work out. […]

Over poker last night we got into a little bit of a number theory argument. One of my friends mistakenly used the word “integer” instead of “prime number” and somehow we got onto defining sets of numbers. (yea, I know we’re dorks, whatever I’m cool with it.) That led a debate about whether 0 was […]

When I was out in Bellevue I did a lot of brainstorming sessions with all kinds of people. Some were employees of my company, others weren’t. Many had worked in startups most of their lives, but there were a few Microsoft transplants among us. Everybody contributed some great ideas and we had some productive things […]

It’s no secret that old media (newspapers mainly) not only hates, but is afraid of new media (blogs.) I’m focusing on the print versions here, but that’s not to say it doesn’t apply to Radio vs Podcasting, CDs vs MP3s, or anything else you want to put here. There’s basically 2 issues to examine here: […]

Every day I read a new article about the RIAA suing somebody or trying to shut down something else. For once I’d just like to imagine they won everything they’re trying to do and see what the world would be like. Let’s try an experiment. Let’s do away with all mp3s, online music stores, internet […]

In a meeting with Susan this morning we started talking about what interests me about certain ideas, and how I judge websites to be a success. It’s something I hadn’t explicitly thought about until she asked me, but I’m pretty happy with how I answered. For years now my friend Jeff and I have been […]

Growing up in the suburbs with a 98% Caucasian population we used to joke about the “crime” of DWB, or “Driving While Black.” It’s not that we were racist, but it sure seemed like the local police were. Luckily those times have changed and our city has grown culturally. Now they profile based on age […]

There’s a lot of companies that are failing miserably at human powered search. Venture capitalists are all too eager to throw their cash toward anybody with a good domain name and a plan to be a “google killer.” (note: start a company to cater to this cash) Then, there’s ChaCha – human powered search that’s […]