Victor

An enjoyable read, informative, and free: How Fatbrain.com chose their name. I love getting an inside look at the crucial and not always so pretty operations of Internet companies.

While it seems a lot of other bloggers are offering their epinions, I chose to offer some ematter. First, because the idea of selling content in the form of encrypted files is a similar model to something I’m doing at work. Second, it feels more like being published. Even if you get published on a…

Note to self: make entry on Lambertville and the Inn

Some photos from college. Believe or not they’re barely touched up – that’s natural fog. Makes me pine for my old Pentax K1000. This guy even includes a .wav file of the shutter sound! What a nice touch.

I like how the proprietor of the nubbin is proud of her cat photos and not averse to exposing details of her life to the world. I really must do more of this. Here’s a photo of Limerick (mostly my girlfriend’s cat but a little mine too):

I’m at LivePerson right now trying out this live support thingy. Gotta admit at first I was genuinely afraid to initiate this conversation – maybe I’m just too shy. Interestingly they let you choose from among four different “operators” – there must be some interesting psychology behind who chooses a male or female or what…

Confusing chat with sales support. At first the idea of chat-based support seems silly, but given that you may be tying up your only phone line, or want support while you’re shopping, or surfing from your WAP phone, I guess it’s not so silly.

I’m trying to use the Open Directory Project search engine instead of Yahoo!, but it’s a difficult adjustment. Lulled into an easier way of phrasing queries like “creating a taxonomy” by Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, et al, I’m back to having to just type key terms, since Open Directory will search and retrive the “a” in…

peterme just landed a job as creative director at epinions, which makes me think about the epinions business model and sociology more (are sociologists studying this stuff? They should). I’m comparing a book reviewer who works at a newspaper to a book reviewer at epinions. Let’s see if I can do a table freehand… newspaperepinions…

I never cease to be amazed at Jakob Nielsen’s conformist philosophy. Take these two passages from his newest Alertbox: “It is much harder to say what good things to do since I have never seen a website that was truly stellar with respect to usability. “ and (in a list of things that will “will…

ohhhhhhhhhhhh, I’ve heard of Nathan before, he did this “Unified Field Theory of Design” that, despite its grandiose name, has some great ideas in it.

The Throwing Sponge technique below helped me find Nathan, who will actually be at the same Living Surfaces conferences as myself this month!

Yehaaa…a beautiful new way to find cool new stuff on the web. Take a work that’s rare and specific to your domain of interest – for me today it was “taxonomy” (a scheme for categorizing stuff) and offer it to the Search Engine Gods. Neat results. Like taking a sponge soaked in your favorite color…

Another ridiculously one-sided and shallow story about Google. I’ve ranted about their dangerous equating of importance with popularity, and will continue to harass these authors until they think about the implications of this stuff. On a related note, “Whose Web Is It, Anyway?” points out that Yahoo!’s editors are getting too picky for the mortal…

Dave Seigal, author of the questionable Creating Killer Web Sites book, is now thinking big concept: “Futurize Your Enterprise”. That little rhyming title sets the hokey tone for the whole presentation, which seems to use the same template as the Ginsu knives commercials. And why should we trust this guy who could be perceived as…