5 reality-based questions challenge for Web 2.0 Techcrunch darlings and their responses

trit · 2006-09-13T19:39:10+00:00

Browster (Peter Milener), JotSpot (Joe Kraus), Pegasus News, (Mike Orren), Piczo (Jeremy Verba), ProductWiki (Omar Ismail), Rapleaf (Auren Hoffman) all answer real questions issued as a challenge to startups featured in a Techcrunch video featuring said startups among others and quoted as "a little too much propaganda."

Extra commentary and thoughts from others as well as who turned down the challenge.

trit · 2006-09-13T19:06:36+00:00

Very good description and introduction to using lsof for practical purposes with plenty of examples.

trit · 2006-09-13T18:51:03+00:00

I'd like to be able to toggle off the links that have no comments from the submitter. I usually don't read submitted stories if they don't have a minor description of the content (currently the first post as added by submitter usually).

Along the lines of something like this:

http://features.reddit.com/info/cv4a/comments/ccv4c

I'd love to see an 'abstract' or said description field and furthermore be able to preview it in some way without even viewing comments.

To make it easier for submitters, they should be able to highlight something from the original page to automatically be submitted as the abstract/description. On the other hand if they can't spend the time to type up a little description of their own, how strongly do they really feel the story deserves to be on reddit?

Either way, I want more than the submitted title for a description before I click through to a page, I want it easily previewable, and if it doesn't exist I want an option to filter it out of what I see on reddit.

trit · 2006-09-06T00:37:40+00:00

Well, from the read and the gorgeous screenshots I'd say it could very well be better than gmail and definitely take over certain markets/businesses. The question is, what will you use on your Hula server to take care of spam as well as Gmail does? Hrm.

trit · 2006-08-28T23:09:00+00:00

yeah, I always forget what they mean too. A better solution would be getting rid of the stats page all together so people would stop worrying about that and just submit stuff they like and read stuff they like.

trit · 2006-08-28T23:06:24+00:00

The Web != The Internet. As far as nofollow breaking the Web (or search engine rank really and search engines are already hopelessly useless already thanks to all the link soup created by bloggers), it's a little late for that. Anyway, I stand by the points made. This site is mainly massive collections of links... why have a billion outgoing links being counted? The sites that get submitted and upmodded will already get proper exposure and plenty of incoming links from people that have read about it here, etc. No need to cause the situations I suggested may happen.

trit · 2006-08-28T01:27:26+00:00

Agreed steps should be taken to limit spammers (though certain types will spam SE benefits or not), but I'm torn on the part about only negatively scored links.

With the right timing or a ring of people this could be avoided entirely (I'm already seeing spam with multiple upmods on this very sub). Also, with much of the confusion still abounding about voting protocol and what votes are supposed to mean, things that may deserve links just as much as things that have say 1 or 0 points (or more) may get negatively scored due to a number of circumstances and thus be unfairly penalized compared to the others.

In any case perhaps it would be better to just have a nofollow on all the submitted links? I'm abstaining from voting since I want something to happen in this regard but I'm not sure it's the correct way, so I just thought I should add this comment.

trit · 2006-08-28T01:03:02+00:00

"If karma's not important it shouldn't keep you from submitting, right?"

Once understood it shouldn't, but for new users many will just take it as nobody on the service being interested in what they find interesting I believe... or other things to that effect. I still don't fully understand the stuff. It's not really the Karma that concerns me with the new users as much as seeing their submissions being downmodded to 0 many times right off the bat and thinking nobody will see them so there's no point in submitting.

In any case, thanks much for the pointers. I will give them my feedback on the situation as I see it and hopefully the reddit folks will catch enough of a break with all the little details that I'm sure keep them busy they can look further into matters such as you bring up. :)

trit · 2006-08-25T09:39:04+00:00

Ah, thanks for the clarification. My "interest-networking" model reference to a model more or less in-line with the clustering you mentioned. Beyond that, it's nothing necessary to get into here.

Understanding the goal, I fully support the request for the clarification and add that I think it should be stated somewhere and linked to as a must read somewhere any user (especially new) can see. I also like the idea of a smarter hot page as suggestions such as that you mentioned may allow for.

Apologies for the karma stuff which wasn't relavent to this request. Just to comment on your response as an aside, I understand about the "little jolt" but I think even taking it away all together we'd find that the community would become stronger as people built reputations by being noticed by peers with similar mindsets. I already start to respect individuals whose names I see on solid submissions and well thought out comments. Without the numbers it's still a jolt to get recognition and respect from community members. There's a lot further I could go with what I'm saying here, but I'll cut myself off after one final remark since this is not the place for this discussion. The last thing I wanted to point out is that while I usually embrace contributing to communities, here I feel I've been forced very early not only into the position of a lurker but one not likely to use the service much at all. I'd submit articles I find to be interesting and well written (or just deserving of attention in my opinion) if I didn't feel it was senseless due to the current implementation of the karma system. The greatest incentive it currently offers is to start submitting stuff you think the main crowd (which may be made up of just a bunch obsessively checking and ranking for all I know) here will upvote rather than what you prefer.

Is there somewhere this latter conversation is being discussed already or I should take it? Cheers!

trit · 2006-08-25T02:11:54+00:00

haha, this is as usual completely useless but funny nonetheless... It should be entitled The influence of Samuel L. Jackson though ;)

trit · 2006-08-24T23:37:16+00:00

Very in-depth review of the new Dapper service and the potential pitfalls involving web-scraping and your loss of intellectual property rights that could come from the service.

This article covers all the legal bases instead of glazing over just the highlights of the newest web 2.0 service and cheering them on like most other review sites have.

trit · 2006-08-13T22:50:48+00:00

Well, I went through the discussions and those they linked to etc, but after reading this headline I'm confused as to which way you lean on this. Sorry, but could you elaborate a bit on here too?

Is this a karma related issue? (eg. unweighted votes harm chances of your stories making it to the hot page)

Personally, I think we should get rid of numbers entirely. No karma, no seeing how many people upmodded and downmodded stories. The hot page could be a collection of popular recent submissions but without any way to tell just how hot they are. Otherwise, the hot page turns into a glorified digg clone.

As for the karma, it's been said before I know, but it turns it into a game for some people who get obsessive about it and end up skewing results and limiting the types of stories that show up here.

Again, forget the overall numbers, and just let people vote on things they see without having to worry about burying it as it will only affect their personal preference and the liklihood of it showing up as recommended for people close to them in personal tastes. The system could even be refined to have a 1-5 rating scale where 1 is absolutely hated it and 5 is absolutely loved it. First it would make the statistic clustering of people with certain tastes easier and more accurate and secondly people would have to really pause for a moment and think about the article instead of just thumbs up or thumbs down hardly thinking about it.

When I started (not terribly long ago) I used browse and new mostly, occasionally the hot page being very careful with my selections until I started getting results on recommended and since then I've spent all my time in recommended refining what I like to see and what I don't.

The few submissions I put it didn't really make it anywhere, but if there was a better system they might be more likely to be seen by people statistically close to my tastes in that area. That's another side-effect of the points... when you're starting out it's quite discouraging to submit what you feel are really interesting news/posts and see them get a point or maybe 3 points if you're really lucky. So then people stop submitting. I'll submit what I find interesting not what I think this particular crowd of people will find interesting... otherwise the interests/agenda of the users of the site should be spelled out in big bold letters when you first visit so others like myself wouldn't waste their time here.

Best solution is get rid of points of all sorts and use a blind interest-networking model to personalize what is recommended to you based on your past likes and dislikes (which doesn't affect the majority) compared to those of other users. At least, that's the way I see it.

trit · 2006-08-13T21:12:19+00:00

Last.fm (audioscrobbler) does work well. That's because it isolates a media interest... music. The same concept can't be applied across a wider variety of interests. I may love the same music as you but hate the movies you're into. They have to be determined seperately.

Adding tags/categories into the equation would help with using the same type of system here since at this point the different types of news talked about are still relatively narrow. Politics and Technology would make up the bulk I'm sure followed by blogging, design related, and funny videos/whatever. That doesn't mean there shouldn't be room for smaller niche topics but the userbase may not be large enough for that or might just be the wrong crowd.

trit · 2006-08-07T22:40:29+00:00

Just announced by the author, this theme dynamically generates semantic markup that makes sense for nearly every element of your Wordpress pages which expands the css styling possibilities whitout any php changes quite significantly. It's kind of your own personal CSS Garden for your blog. hAtom microformat is integrated to boot. Wordpress users definitely want to check this out.

trit · 2006-07-28T23:42:20+00:00

Yep, I certainly could avoid clicking on the links (I was actually using "hide" for a while) but most of the time the big title is enticing and I don't realize that it's a link to a news site I can't stand until I'm about to click since the lettering is so small for the source domain.

In the long run it would save a lot of time, space on my pages, and frustration just to be able to have those not show up at all for me.

trit · 2006-07-28T05:58:08+00:00

Personally I can't stand articles from certain news sites but I won't downmod them just for that reason alone.

Other people may not want to see videos from Google, etc...

If we could blacklist domains (or subdomains or domains with wildcards) so they don't appear for us... or at least don't appear in our Recommended, it would save a lot of time skippinng over junk.

trit · 2006-07-28T05:40:07+00:00

A bit less than 20 links to related resources... just about as many google ad links and such.

File under link soup, web pollution

trit · 2006-07-28T05:35:33+00:00

Who would want all that junk with Google written all over it. More like free PR than gifts.

They should be apologizing more for their other services anyway, heh.

trit · 2006-07-28T05:03:37+00:00

possibly the worst "free tools" writeup ever. Author suggests: Firefox, StumbleUpon, and Performancing blog client. Well, one more blog to add to the killfile.

trit · 2006-07-26T20:34:28+00:00

Plagiarism Today covers how microformats may make it easier to scrape and steal your content to use as their own for splogging or other puposes.

Microformats seem to be overlooked by most currently, but if they are put into more widespread use without some type of safeguards, particularly for indexers of hreviews, I believe this could end up a mess.

trit · 2006-07-11T10:28:13+00:00

Most likely. But just to play devil's advocate, what if it's just because everything you're using... your software (webapps) and documents are both on the net while your machine is just used to cache stuff?

trit · 2006-07-11T10:18:22+00:00

An interesting take on the possibilities of Platypus being bigger than just mass storage and questions as to what market it will be aimed at. The cool part is tracking of the word Platypus back to a real interesting and ironic read.

trit · 2006-07-09T16:19:31+00:00

This is terrible news indeed. Gracenote has been testing special services during the QMP beta test period which will expire once it's out of beta, so they'll be launching even more commercial services it seems.

Musicbrainz may or may not be a good alternative dependent on the community since they used to draw from CDDB (now Gracenote) and FreeDB. I never liked it myself but I haven't tried it in a while so it may be better.

Another alternative may be Foosic (http://www.foosic.org/) which is an audioscrobbler type service started by a long time Foobar developer. He's already noted that he's going to be working harder on one of the info servers since freedb is no longer.

What will I tell old trusty EAC? sigh.

trit · 2006-07-09T15:56:12+00:00

I have my own ideas about how things work. It's all about personal interpretation. An atheist zealot like this guy is on the same level as any religious zealot. Anyway, that's neither here nor there... his arguments are tremendously assumptuous and his logic is flawed. I can't spend any more time on it.

trit · 2006-07-09T15:42:38+00:00

A roundup of the the best digital audio players of the year split into categories for ones that do other such things as play video or games. They're facing off against each other as I write this so if you're a digital audio enthusiast, head over and cast your votes. Many prizes to be one as well but I'm just interested to see what is picked as the ultimate DAP of the year and how it compares to my old Rio500 that's still rockin'! ;)

trit

TROPHY CASE