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Johann Höchtl

What Happened to Yahoo - 0 views

www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

Yahoo Google Microsoft Facebook culture hackers innovation cubicle old

shared by Johann Höchtl on 12 Aug 10 - Cached
  • When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing.
  • What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company.
  • Yahoo had two problems Google didn't: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • The first time I met Jerry Yang, we thought we were meeting for different reasons.
  • we could show him our new technology, Revenue Loop. It was a way of sorting shopping search results.
  • It was like the algorithm Google uses now to sort ads, but this was in the spring of 1998, before Google was founded.
  • I didn't say "But search traffic is worth more than other traffic!"
  • Hard as it is to believe now, the big money then was in banner ads.
  • Led by a large and terrifyingly formidable man called Anil Singh, Yahoo's sales guys would fly out to Procter & Gamble and come back with million dollar orders for banner ad impressions.
  • By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto pyramid scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth.
  • The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it.
  • I remember telling David Filo in late 1998 or early 1999 that Yahoo should buy Google, because I and most of the other programmers in the company were using it instead of Yahoo for search.
  • But Yahoo also had another problem that made it hard to change directions. They'd been thrown off balance from the start by their ambivalence about being a technology company
  • Microsoft (back in the day), Google, and Facebook have all been obsessed with hiring the best programmers. Yahoo wasn't. They preferred good programmers to bad ones, but they didn't have the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had.
  • The company felt prematurely old.
  • The first time I visited Google, they had about 500 people,
  • I remember talking to some programmers in the cafeteria about the problem of gaming search results (now known as SEO), and they asked "what should we do?" Programmers at Yahoo wouldn't have asked that.
  • In the software business, you can't afford not to have a hacker-centric culture.
  • Probably the most impressive commitment I've heard to having a hacker-centric culture came from Mark Zuckerberg, when he spoke at Startup School in 2007. He said that in the early days Facebook made a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing.
  • Hacker culture often seems kind of irresponsible. That's why people proposing to destroy it use phrases like "adult supervision." That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example.
  • Johann Höchtl on 12 Aug 10
     
    Paul Graham hat mit dem Verkauf seiner Shop Lösung an Yahoo 1998 Millionen von Dollar gemacht. Er ist Buchautor und respektierter Columnist. Ein Artikel von ihm, warum seiner Meinung nach Yahoo scheiterte und FB und Google erfolgreicht waren.
Parycek

Crowd-sourcing is not empowering enough - 0 views

www.deliberations.com.au/...-is-not-empowering-enough.html

deliberation Crowd-sourcing edem

shared by Parycek on 08 Mar 10 - Cached
    • Parycek
      Parycek on 20 Mar 10
       
      It invites individuals to foist and endorse (or not) ideas with no pressure to consider the full public consequences of them, including whether they can be sustained across ideological or partisan lines, or how practical they are, or how insulting of public officers. There is the published intention to attract a full range of public perspectives, but instead it tends to attract enclaves of people with committed strategies (eg. embarrass public officials) or perspectives (eg. technology is the answer). While national initiatives attract noise, in more local applications of such ideation, participation is often too thin to be meaningful. This all comes down the question of representativeness. If a governing body is going to legitimately use these ideas, and be compelled to do so, then there has to be good evidence that the contributors do actually form a descriptive representation of the public being governed. I think if you have a technical problem that requires particular expertise, then such ideation processes can find the needle in the haystack. Those of us who subscribe to technical forums know how well that works. I think some people feel that public policy ideation works the same way, but it doesn't because in a contested political environment, what "should be done" is claimed on normative rather than technical grounds. Another metaphor for the ranking in ideation is consumer selection, which many in political science would model as rational choice, privileging private over public interests. Should that be the motor for the selection of public policy? I write all this knowing full well that I risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I just think we can do better. Some ideation processes should invite people randomly, to ensure full demographic spread on relevant dimensions (eg. age, education, political leaning). Let's have multi-stage processes, where contributors do more than just introduce and rank ideas--to their credit, thi
  • Parycek on 20 Mar 10
     
    I fear that ultimately crowd-sourcing is damaging the enterprise of dialogue and deliberation (D&D).
Parycek

The History of Transparency - 3 views

blog.sunlightfoundation.com/...the-people-in-the-18th-century

transparency opengov opendata participation

shared by Parycek on 24 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Parycek on 24 Mar 10
     
    Opening the Channels of Information to the People in the 18th Century - Making Government Transparent and Accountable - Sunlight Foundation Blog
Parycek

What is the Definition of Government 2.0? - 1 views

you2gov.wordpress.com/...gov20la-first-day

gov20 opengov citizen20 participation

shared by Parycek on 27 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Parycek on 27 Mar 10
     
    This is about the merger of Government 2.0 and Citizen 2.0 = People enforcing their ownership of the Government. Not vice-versa.
  • Johann Höchtl on 27 Mar 10
     
    >> People enforcing their ownership of the Government. Not vice-versa. Das wäre eher die Definition für Open Government für mich, Gov 2.0 ist die Verwendung von Web 2.0 Komponenten im Government-Prozess. Was über Umwege "enforcing their ownership of the Government" bedeuten kann, aber eben nicht muss, weil es keine Garantie dafür gibt.
Johann Höchtl

Open Data Has Little Value If People Can't Use It - Craig Hammer - Harvard Business Review - 1 views

blogs.hbr.org/..._data_has_little_value_if.html

open data value people use HBR

shared by Johann Höchtl on 30 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • the hard reality is that much of the public has been left behind, or tacked on as an afterthought
  • So how can we support "data-literacy" across the full spectrum of users, including media, NGOs, labor unions, professional associations, religious groups, universities, and the public at large? Here's one approach. It's time and resource intensive, but crucial — institutionalizing data literacy across societies.
thinkahol *

Guest Post Arrested in Los Angeles - A Terrifying Ordeal in a Police State | Mitchel Cohen - 0 views

www.mitchelcohen.com/?p=1775

Guest Post Arrested in Los Angeles - Terrifying Ordeal a Police State | Mitchel Cohen

shared by thinkahol * on 08 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 08 Dec 11
     
    My name is Patrick Meighan, and I'm a husband, a father, a writer on the Fox animated sitcom "Family Guy", and a member of the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica. I was arrested at about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning with 291 other people at Occupy LA. I was sitting in City Hall Park with a pillow, a blanket, and a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh's "Being Peace" when 1,400 heavily-armed LAPD officers in paramilitary SWAT gear streamed in. I was in a group of about 50 peaceful protesters who sat Indian-style, arms interlocked, around a tent (the symbolic image of the Occupy movement). The LAPD officers encircled us, weapons drawn, while we chanted "We Are Peaceful" and "We Are Nonviolent" and "Join Us." As we sat there, encircled, a separate team of LAPD officers used knives to slice open every personal tent in the park. They forcibly removed anyone sleeping inside, and then yanked out and destroyed any personal property inside those tents, scattering the contents across the park. They then did the same with the communal property of the Occupy LA movement. For example, I watched as the LAPD destroyed a pop-up canopy tent that, until that moment, had been serving as Occupy LA's First Aid and Wellness tent, in which volunteer health professionals gave free medical care to absolutely anyone who requested it. As it happens, my family had personally contributed that exact canopy tent to Occupy LA, at a cost of several hundred of my family's dollars. As I watched, the LAPD sliced that canopy tent to shreds, broke the telescoping poles into pieces and scattered the detritus across the park. Note that these were the objects described in subsequent mainstream press reports as "30 tons of garbage" that was "abandoned" by Occupy LA: personal property forcibly stolen from us, destroyed in front of our eyes and then left for maintenance workers to dispose of while we were sent to prison.
thinkahol *

We Stand With the Majority of Americans: Human Needs, Not Corporate Greed | October 2011 - 0 views

october2011.org/standwiththemajority

We Stand With the Majority of Americans: Human Needs Not Corporate Greed | October 2011

shared by thinkahol * on 10 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 10 Nov 11
     
    A large majority of the American people consistently support the following agenda: Tax the rich and corporations End the wars, bring the troops home, cut military spending Protect the social safety net, strengthen Social Security and improved Medicare for all End corporate welfare for oil companies and other big business interests Transition to a clean energy economy, reverse environmental degradation Protect worker rights including collective bargaining, create jobs and raise wages Get money out of politics
Johann Höchtl

Barack Obama Directs All Federal Agencies to Have an API @ API Evangelist - 0 views

blog.apievangelist.com/...ederal-agencies-to-have-an-api

API US obama federal agency

shared by Johann Höchtl on 02 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • The Whitehouse CIO has released a strategy, entitled "Digital Government: Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People", providing federal agencies with a 12-month plan that focuses on
Parycek

TEDxÖresund - 0 views

www.tedxoresund.com

video ted tedx

shared by Parycek on 07 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Parycek on 07 Jun 10
     
    TED has created a program called TEDx. TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience.
thinkahol *

Misregulation Aiding Plunder of Fish, Other Resources - IPS ipsnews.net - 0 views

www.ipsnews.net/news.asp

plunder misregulation fish resources

shared by thinkahol * on 04 Jun 10 - Cached
  • thinkahol * on 04 Jun 10
     
    WASHINGTON, Jun 2, 2010 (IPS) - The resources society derives from nature have been horribly mismanaged and this will lead to the children of the world's poorest people remaining in poverty, according to Paul Collier. The easiest of these resources to regulate is fish, but we have not even managed to get that right, he said.
Johann Höchtl

Benefits of Enterprise 2.0 - 0 views

e20portal.com/...print.html

openness participation benefits

shared by Johann Höchtl on 01 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Enterprise 2.0 is already demonstrating real business value for many organisations. It has opened up new methods for communication and conversations, and has transformed the way that companies share and access information.Openness encourages participationIf people feel like they can make a difference, they will. The Enterprise 2.0 approach promotes open communications that encourage respect and participation, even across geographic and cultural boundaries. Access to knowledge empowers and motivates people to strive towards common goals together.
  • Johann Höchtl on 01 Jul 10
     
    openness encourages participation
thinkahol *

The movement to smother solidarity : Johann Hari - 0 views

johannhari.com/...movement-to-smother-solidarity

relativism

shared by thinkahol * on 07 Jun 10 - Cached
  • thinkahol * on 07 Jun 10
     
    Should you shut up about human rights abuses because they are happening far away, to people you don't know, who have a different culture or colour or creed? There is now a growing movement across the world saying that, yes, empathy should be cauterised at national borders. The world is carved into cultures, and they should not try to comment critically on each other. Instead, they should be "respectful." You can criticise Your Own Kind, but not Foreigners, because they are unbridgeably different to you. This claim is now made by a strange coalition stretching from the Israeli government to African dictators to Western multiculturalists - and they are trying to give it the force of law.
thinkahol *

The New York Times > National > Portraits of Grief > Mohammad Salman Hamdani: An All-Am... - 0 views

events.nytimes.com/...POG-09HAMDANI.html

All-American Jedi

shared by thinkahol * on 17 Aug 10 - Cached
  • thinkahol * on 17 Aug 10
     
    More than anything else, Mohammad Salman Hamdani wanted people to see him for who he truly was, not for who he seemed to be.
thinkahol *

Muslim Americans Find Their Voice Amid The Shouts : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...story.php

muslim americans

shared by thinkahol * on 07 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 07 Sep 10
     
    In towns across the country, the voices of those who don't want mosques built in their neighborhoods are growing louder. The open expressions of hostility have become so loud in recent months, that a coalition of Muslim groups is taking steps to remind people that American Muslims are Americans -- the same as anyone else.
Johann Höchtl

Why Dunbar's Number is Irrelevant | Social Media Today - 0 views

www.socialmediatoday.com/...169132

dunbar number SNS irrelevant facebook twitter

shared by Johann Höchtl on 29 Oct 10 - Cached
  • Dunbar's number it basically says that the most amount of people that you can maintain stable social relationships with is 150
  • Dunbar's number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.
  • Morten Hansen's fantastic book on Collaboration in which he states that the real value of collaboration and of networks doesn't come from strong relationships and networks but from weak one's. 
Johann Höchtl

Open Knowledge Foundation Blog » Blog Archive » Rethinking Open Data: Lessons... - 0 views

blog.okfn.org/...from-the-open-data-front-lines

knowledge OKNF opendata types groupie

shared by Johann Höchtl on 19 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • You can build it but they won’t come. All successful open source projects build communities of supportive engaged developers who identify with the project and keep it productive and useful.
  • Ongoing maintenance and distribution of the data hasn’t been budgeted for almost all the data sets we have today. This attitude has to change, and new projects give us the chance to get it right, but most existing datasets are unfunded for maintenance and release.
  • there are at least five different types of Open Data groupie: low-polling governments who want to see a PR win from opening their data, transparency advocates who want a more efficient and honest government, citizen advocates who want services and information to make their lives better, open advocates who believe that governments act for the people therefore government data should be available for free to the people, and wonks who are hoping that releasing datasets of public toilets will deliver the same economic benefits to the country as did opening the TIGER geo/census dataset.
Parycek

Twitter 101 - Case Study: The United States Geological Survey - 0 views

business.twitter.com/...case_usgs

twitter case

shared by Parycek on 23 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Parycek on 23 Mar 10
     
    One of the U.S. Geological Survey's unique responsibilities is the monitoring and reporting of earthquakes, which affect the daily lives of people around the world. By mining real-time tweets, the USGS expands its suite of seismically derived information and obtains first-hand accounts of shaking seconds after an earthquake occurs.
Parycek

The Social Media Bubble - 1 views

blogs.hbr.org/...the_social_media_bubble.html

opengov socialmedia opendata

shared by Parycek on 25 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Call it relationship inflation.
  • Trust
  • Disempowerment
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Hate. There's this old trope: the Internet runs on love. Equally, though, it's full of hate: irrational lashing-out at the nearest person, place, or thing that's just a little bit different.
  • Exclusion. Hate happens, at least in part, because of homophily: birds of a feather flock together. The result is that people self-organize into groups of like for like.
  • Value. The ultimate proof's in the pudding. If the "relationships" created on today's Internet were valuable, perhaps people (or advertisers) might pay for the opportunity to enjoy them. Yet, few, if any, do — anywhere, ever.
  • Parycek on 25 Mar 10
     
    Umair Haque - Harvard Business Review
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