Wednesday, June 19, 2002

I've been tinkering with MovableType at home and at work (where I'm using it to publish some design docs).   So far, I like it... I especially like the bookmark that takes whatever you have selected with your mouse on a web page and creates a posting to MT with it the title to the page and a link to the page.   I also like the fact that you can create multiple sites with one installation.   I know you technically do this with Userland using categories, but I just find the seperate site idea more appealling.   I also like the fact that it's intended to run at the web site rather than on my desktop -- so I can access it remotely just as easily as at home.   It also comes out of the box with a nice clean look and the templates are (so far) easier to edit.   I wish it had support for news aggregation and for streaming the site to a remote site (it might, I didn't look very hard ";->"). 9:40:06 PM

Business Week:  >>>...fuel cells are improving in efficiency by about 30% a year, according to McNeil. <<<  Note that fuels cells represent a jump in substrate for personal power generation.  As a result, the price performance improvements may accumulate quickly.  Right now, it is on a 2.5 year doubling rate.  Further, by decentralizing power production (fuel cells that run in the basement for $2 k a pop), transmission loss is eliminated. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 9:26:58 PM

John Robb. How to boost employee productivity by using a news aggregator. [klogs] >>>A small change in the way we work could shave 45 minutes off of the average workday.  That small change is to use a news aggregator to get news instead of gathering it by hand.  Applied across a 200 person company, that 45 minutes of savings could be worth $1,650,000 a year.  The wild part is that the cost to implement this is only $8,000 and requires little if any support from the IT department.  <<< 10:48:15 AM

Business Week.  30 Gb read/write DVDs on the way.  There is also an interesting story how Japan lost one of its most innovative scientists to a US company. >>>True to form, Nakamura is debugging his next breakthrough: an ultraviolet laser that he hopes will make possible disks that hold twice as much as the upcoming generation. That could give rise to a whole new species of couch potato.<<<  60 Gb ! [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 10:44:10 AM

Human attention is increasingly becoming a scarce resource.  I heard that somewhere -- I wish I could remember where.    For producers the challenge will be attracting my attention -- how will newspapers attract me in for a look, how will musicians get me to listen.  For consumers (the folks with attention to allocate) the challenge will be allocating attention to maximize yield -- how will I filter out all the noise of people generated by people trying to attract my attention (filtering can use up my attention too -- thats time wasted for everyone), how will I allocate my attention most to spend the most time on the things that are most important. how do I measure yield for attention?   can I predict the yield?   how much attention do I have to allocate before I can accurately estimate yield?   how can I estimate yield?   what can I do to maximize yield? 7:36:03 AM

Home prices expected to ease in the Bay Area >>>What has UCLA's Edward Leamer most concerned is that rental rates are not rising nearly as fast as the price buyers are willing to plunk down to grab a house here. In a classic bubble, the price of assets far outstrips their underlying value, and that's what Anderson's economists see in the Bay Area.<<< This is what I've been saying:  you can't see rents drop through the floor and not at some point see it reflected in house prices -- in a real way, the value of the house has gone down.   As to why the market has yet to flatline, the story also mentions the role of stock and the expectation that the local economy will return to '97-'98 levels which, given the aftermath of the .com bubble, the current crisis of faith in corporate leadership, and they steady stream of bad news from tech companies seems unlikely in the extreme -- even we did get the engines roaring again, it would be quite some time before we see it in the stock market.   The article did not mention the role of bargain interest rates in keeping the market a float. The counterpoint in the article was that tech revenues has begun to rise -- we could see a quick rebound for the local economy.  I think it's premature to make that prediction. 7:18:16 AM

Start-up wants your help to fight spam. Wow - this is a really neat idea. It's basically a P2P spam filter. A free Outlook plugin (hopefully other mail clients will be added soon) that any user can click "This is spam" on a message. Then based on trust metrics, and how many users deem it spam - the message is marked as spam for all users of the system. P2P at it's best! [rebelutionary] 6:43:36 AM