Shanti’s Dispatches

I’ve been reading The Perfect Store: Inside eBay these last few hours. As you may know, eBay now has a market cap that is greater than that of Yahoo and Amazon combined. I actually knew very little about eBay’s history, besides the lore of PEZ dispensers, etc.

Over and over again, people who came into contact with the eBay founders and employees just “didn’t get it.” They didn’t believe that people would actually buy and sell items with each other, anonymously, over the Internet. Even when eBay was doing millions of dollars worth of sales per month, they’d meet skeptics (even leading VCs) who said “it just won’t work.” Well, wake up, and smell the marketplace. It already is working.

I’ve said it before: ideas are a dime a dozen (and 46,800 people agree with me). Anyone can tell you why something won’t work. These people, in all fairness, are trying to help you. They’re usually trying to save you from wasting your time. But if you really want to see whether your idea will work, there’s only one way to find out: Let the marketplace decide.

Just got this link from a friend: Indonesia Help - Earthquake and Tsunami Victims

Chris has a new show, this time “it’s a gnomecast.” You can check it out over at thechrispirillowshow.com. Here’s its first entry.

Produced independent from those who rule your radio dial, even our partners know the value of letting you take this knowledge with you wherever you may roam. It’s a “gnomecast” recorded in MP3 format - freeing you to become a knowledge nomad with any portable device. Podcasting, broadcasting, netcasting… ultimately, you just want the content on your own terms! No longer will the consumer need to rely on retail salespeople to help them make decisions that may or may not suit their needs.

People don’t know where (or who) to turn to for help - because few are telling them where to turn. They’d just as soon not call tech support because they’re afraid of being on hold and eventually talking to a person who doesn’t quite understand the problem. There’s no Emeril for technology, no Martha Stewart for computers… yet. Chris has one of those personalities that is both authoritative and approachable - making for one great show host!

Modest Mouse - Float On (Lyrics)

I backed my car into a cop car the other day
Well he just drove off sometimes life’s ok
I ran my mouth off a bit too much oh what can i say
Well you just laughed it off it was all ok

And we’ll all float on ok
And we’ll all float on ok
And we’ll all float on ok
And we’ll all float on any way well

Well, a fake Jamaican took every last dime with a scam
It was worth it just to learn from sleight-of-hand
Bad news comes don’t you worry even when it lands
Good news will work its way to all them plans
We both got fired on the exactly the same day
Well we’ll float on good news is on the way

And we’ll all float on ok
And we’ll all float on ok
And we’ll all float on ok
And we’ll all float on alright
Already we’ll all float on
Now don’t worry we’ll all float on
Alright already we’ll all float on
Alright don’t worry we’ll all float on

And we’ll all float on alright
Already we’ll all float on
Aliright don’t worry even if things end up a bit to heavy
we’ll all float on alright
Already we’ll all float on
Alright already we’ll all float on
Ok don’t worry we’ll all float on
Even if things get heavy we’ll all float on
Alright already we’ll all float on
Don’t you worry we’ll all float on
All float on

New photo geo-aggregator: Mappr!

Mappr is an interactive environment for exploring place, based on the photos people take. By adding geographical information to the wealth of photographs found online, it allows new ways of looking at spaces and images. Mappr adds place to pictures.

Mappr takes advantage of the cornucopia of descriptive information provided by Flickr’s users to organize their photos. Flickr’s admirable policy of openness with its data provides a way to anticipate and envision a future where cheaply-available GPS technology generates this placement as a matter of course. There’s no reason to wait for this technology to become common; by mapping the millions of photos that Flickr makes available, we can start looking at its broad scale potential now.

I’ve been working on the business plan lately for Menlo Park 2.0 - the human captial investment group I’m forming with a few close friends. Not to mention incredibly talented entrepreneurs who I’ve never even met face-to-face! They feel like close friends, regardless.

After re-reading a section of the plan, I realized it totally sums up what we’re all about.

Menlo Park 2.0 - Our Message

Our core founders have all experienced a taste of entrepreneurial success. Most people will never know this ultimate joy. Most people are stopped because they make reasons and excuses for why they canít start the venture of their dreams.

What weíre saying is ñ you can achieve your dreams, but you have to look outside yourself. You may not have the startup capital necessary. Lenders and investors may have turned you down.

But if your new venture is one that only requires human capital ñ there may be someone out there, just like you, looking for a business partner. Perhaps your skills and their skills are completely complimentary.

Together, you are the ultimate entrepreneur. This is our message.

Shanti Braford
Co-founder and Chief Evangelist
Menlo Park 2.0

Great comment on Procrastination in this article about David Allen’s Getting Things Done:

Procrastination is a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision.

Those most vulnerable to procrastination are those who feel the most threatened by difficulty in starting a project; criticism; failure; and the loss of opportunities that may result from commiting to one project.

I’m working on a meta-framework to wrap around Getting Things Done. It’s going to be called GTD++. Basically it combines David Allen’s GTD system with a classic goal-setting method, plus another layer of time + energy management. Like GTD, on crack.

Gravatar - Globally Recognized Avatar

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an 80√ó80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?

Snazzy.

I’m becoming convinced that del.icio.us may be Knowledge Management’s first Killer App.

It’s simplicity lends itself to Killer-App-Dom. Not some souped up $3M J2EE-Oracle-Web_Services piece of crap a group of 15 overpaid consulting services guys would come up with for a Fortune 500 Company. Sure, management may read the latest book on KM (knowledge management) and think they need that. Sorry - you’re employees are going to hate you. Give them an Intranet-only del.icio.us server, and let them go crazy.

There’s one piece that it’s missing for uber-KM, that perhaps would be better addressed in a seperate web app.
- SuperMemo-like functionality. More about SuperMemo here.

Ironically, I came across SuperMemo while browsing del.icio.us’ popular links page.

What this uber-cool KM++ web app would be, is, I would call, a “social factdexing service.” Instead of bookmarking, you enter each fact as a discreet question & answer.

This service would provide functionality to quiz yourself on your knowledge base, and would use SuperMemo-style learning & memory retention algorithms to ensure that you don’t forget too much of your knowledge base. This would be an optional feature. It could also just be used as a braindump resource, and you could use it as a reference-only KM tool.

This factdexing service would have the following features:
- ability to tag facts/knowledge with keywords (a la del.icio.us)
- ability to set a user-default of private, as well as a per-post setting of private (i.e. for personal KM u don’t want to share
- the stream of facts (as shown on its main page) would all be public, and with a little user-moderation, globally applicable.
globally applicable mean, for example, that you have created a piece of knowledge (a question/answer pair) that anyone in the world could potentially make use of. i.e. in the public stream of Knowledge, we don’t want an item like “Where are my scheduling documents located on the Intranet?” - this should be tagged as private.
- ability to create groupings of knowledge, i.e. US Capitals, CSS Fundamentals, etc. This would go beyond the distributed tagging. You could have namespaces, etc.

The inherant flaws with this kind of system:
- Duplicate facts/knowledge. Whether this would be a “flaw” - I’ll leave up to the court. It’s an important data-model issue, and goes to the scalability of this kind of system. But it’s important that I be able to create any piece of Knowledge on the fly and add it to my KM stream. Search functionality could alleviate some of this. Perhaps you want to add, “How do I enable directory-security in Apache using htaccess files?” Type in a search for “apache htaccess” and you discover that someone has already entered this item. Test it out, make sure the piece of knowledge is correct/accurate, and if so, add this knowledge item to your stream.
- Users adding personal-specific, not “globally applicable” knowledge to the public stream. This could alleviated some by user moderation. If you see a non globally applicable piece of knowledge in the main stream, flag it as “private knowledge” and over time the system learns.

I’ll come back to this post & update it… I think there’s something here, and someone really should implement this, but I’m not going to be that guy, at least not right now. My plate is kinda full right now. Not to mention my day job.

This is it. I’ve achieved Google zen.

One of my blog pages has achieved the #1 google ranking for hang your balls out there.

Now I’m ranked right up there along with Gay Sex: Masturbation Tips for Gay Men, Simply Gay and Attack of the Killer Pigs Game.

Still need to work my way up to a #1 ranking from the #2 spot for whores fucking over on MSN. Note to MSN Search Guys: do you see any whores fucking on sablog.com? Because if you’ve secretly found some on here, somewhere, please let me know! I’d like to watch, seriously!