Sometimes inequality is bad for almost everyone, and sometimes only for certain people; sometimes it is worst for the people at the bottom, and sometimes it is just as bad for the people at the top. Different societies are equal or unequal for different reasons, sometimes by necessity, sometimes by choice.
More equality is a good thing and it's an idea that's worth defending. It would be nice if there were more politicians willing to stand up and defend it, however they saw fit.
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.
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.
...to measuring the impacts of the proposed US Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) on returns to public investment in R&D. The aim is to define and scope the data collection requirements and further model developments necessary for a robust estimate of the likely impacts of the proposed FRPAA archiving mandate.
If we learned that the government was planning to limit our First Amendment rights, we'd be outraged. After all, our right to be heard is fundamental to our democracy.
Well, our free speech rights are under assault -- not from the government but from corporations seeking to control the flow of information in America.
If that scares you as much as it scares me, then you need to care about net neutrality.
"Net neutrality" sounds arcane, but it's fundamental to free speech. The internet today is an open marketplace. If you have a product, you can sell it. If you have an opinion, you can blog about it. If you have an idea, you can share it with the world.
And no matter who you are -- a corporation selling a new widget, a senator making a political argument or just a Minnesotan sharing a funny cat video -- you have equal access to that marketplace.
April 22, 2008 Democracy Now! Pentagon's Pundits: A Look at the Defense Department's Propaganda Program The New York Times has revealed new details on how the Pentagon recruited more than seventy-five retired military officers to appear on TV outlets as so-called military analysts ahead of the Iraq war to portray Iraq as an urgent threat. The Times reported the Pentagon continues to use the analysts in a propaganda campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration's wartime performance. We speak with Col. Sam Gardiner (Ret.) and Peter Hart of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. (excerpt)
This video became interesting to me simply because of the fact it was announced 1 day prior to the September 11th terrorist attacks in the U.S. Why has there been no mention of the massive amount of the taxpayers money gone missing? It is almost as though after the 9/11 tragedy it was forgotten. I don't know about the other citizens of the United States but I would like to know where 2.3 TRILLION dollars has gone. I believe when we as taxpayers give our hard earnings to the government is it not their responsibility to explain where the money is being spent? Was this case forgotten? If so, WHY? I would like to know where this money has gone. Wouldn't you?
Practical transformation is what Buddhist practice is all about. To practice meditation consistently is to push back hard against the tidal wave of materialism that is quite literally killing the planet.
I have always believed in the ideals of this country, and because of that, I beat the odds and followed my dreams of becoming a working film writer and director. But at some point, I and others who share my faith became the Other.
Social computing will continue to grow in government, but won't hit critical mass in 2010.
Don't forget that there was some clamping down on social media in government during 2009 including the Marines restricting access to services such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter. Progress in 2010 will be better in state and to a lesser extent local government. The federal government will also struggle with a consistent policy and approach for internal and external social computing, which probably won't emerge next year.
Open data goes back to the drawing board. I've been bullish on open data and APIs for years and the government got religion in 2009 with data.gov. But the usage is down as government workers and businesses realize that the data is often far out-of-date and not in forms that can be used operationally.
Cloud computing will go big. While many agencies will just use the technologies internally for now in order to have public options later, there is tremendous interest in the cloud
Government portals (rightly) continue to incorporate social media, but deep engagement will be elusive for now. I've seen many overhauls of government portals this year, including Utah.gov and the Department of Defense, prominently incorporate social media right on their home pages. To be clear, these are major advances for the government to make on the internal/external boundary and I encourage them.
Speziell jüngere Arbeitnehmer sind aus ihrem Privatleben eine Fülle sozialer Medien gewohnt und erwarten, im Unternehmen vergleichbare Arbeitsinstrumente vorzufinden.
86% aller Arbeitskräfte verwenden inoffizielle (nicht von der IT-Abteilung unterstützte) Werkzeuge verwenden, um ihre Produktivität zu steigern.
Ich kenne die Software hinter Jedem gar nicht ... kann daher nichts sagen. Sollte es ein customized Drupal oder ähnliches sein, wirds einfach (wenn auch nicht gratis). Ansosnten könnte es aufwändig werden. Sollten Bachfellner dazu befragen, er ist u.a. ja auch der mit dem notwendigen technischen know-how.
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.
"A recent blizzard of liberal columns has framed the debate over American Islam as if it were no more than the most recent stage in the glorious history of our religious tolerance. This phrasing of the question has the (presumably intentional) effect of marginalizing doubts and of lumping any doubters with the anti-Catholic Know-Nothings, the anti-Semites, and other bigots and shellbacks. So I pause to take part in a thought experiment, and to ask myself: Am I in favor of the untrammeled "free exercise of religion"?"