Brainnovate

New iPhone interface reveals that Digg has been around for almost 40 years.

read more | digg story

I will happily admit, I am a huge Walt Mossberg fan. Walt is a journalist with the Wall Street Journal, and according to wikipedia, he has written the “Personal Technology” Column since 1991. In fact I think I remember reading his very first column back in 91, and thinking to myself… “this will be good.” And it was and instant hit with me at least.

His critiques are usually spot on, and he has helped thousands upon thousands of people solve their most pressing technology issues. I just enjoy his writing style.

I was starting to become concerned about a lack of activity on the official Personal Technology RSS feed, so I started poking around and discovered Walt’s site has improved since my last visit and has a new feed as well. 700+ subscribers make it apparent this didn’t happen yesterday. The perils of viewing the web through the narrow confines of an RSS feed reader I suppose.

The site is worth a look at http://walt.allthingsd.com/, and hopefully is indicative of an increased zeal for online publishing by the Wall Street Journal. Under a thousand subscribers for someone like Walt is just plain appalling.

So thank you Walt Mossberg, I look forward to many more great columns!

For the longest time, I have been a fan of Digg, but never a big time user. I first signed up almost two years ago, and since that time, I have Dugg a few things here and there. But I never really got into it until the last couple weeks.

I am not sure what happened to be honest. My increased interest coincided with the launch of their new “recommendation engine” technology.  Maybe the release of this tool lit some inner spark, because I watched the videos, and immediately went on the site to play. Before I knew it, I was logging hundreds of Diggs, and reading article after article on how best to use (and benefit) from Digg.

Actually, I have always been a fan of “optimization” algorithms.  Over at Vertster we use something called the Taguchi Method to accomplish some pretty cool multivariate testing, so now you know why.

Anyways, the Digg recommendation engine is particularly interesting because on the surface it seems to give you more of a chance at getting noticed if you suffer from low Digg authority (ie you haven’t been doing it for long.)  However, in reality, it adds another layer of “black box” to the site- what we call it at Vertster when you have an unknown algorithm and all you can see are the inputs and outputs but have no idea what goes on in the middle.

On the surface it appears to give Digg another chance at separating the wheat from the chaff so to speak.  By analyzing a number of signals, the algorithm could display certain submissions more frequently than others.  It also adds a fertile new area that should earn more pageviews than the old standard upcoming page, which was nearly impossible to get noticed on without help from friends.

So what are these signals likely to be?  Well I am sure there are some very smart Diggers who are probably trying to decode this right now… but it will be tough because its likely to be a moving target.   Some of the factors I would expect to be included and weighted heavily would be the Digg authority of the submitter, and also that of the browser.

Of course the contextual matching engine is also at work- the part of the software that tries to show you stuff you are likely to be interested in.  But also, I bet there are other things like time of day, day of week, and current events.  These “moving targets” will make it difficult to decode the exact algorithm and should improve its effectiveness at showing sticky content.

If you are like me, you at least considered going out to S.F. for the Google IO conference. Maybe you even went. The well constructed marketing site certainly piqued my interest, although to be honest I was afraid it would turn out to be a CJU’esk infomercial for Google technologies.  In the end I decided not to go- and now a lot of the sessions have just appeared online.  Lucky me.

So far I have only begun watching the ones that are of interest to me.  For starters, I have been watching “Even Faster Websites.”  This is a natural fit for me, because faster websites improve conversion rates.  I had not heard of or even thought of a lot of the tweaks mentioned- many of which have to do with javascript. Since our multivariate testing software Vertster uses a lot of javascript and ajaxy stuff, this is a good fit for those reasons as well.

I also am going to take a look at the session “Painless Python for Proficient Programmers.”  I have only taken a cursory look at Python, but look forward to learning more about it and Google’s new app engine.

I already know from this blog’s stats that a large percentage of you are either 1- not using windows at all, or 2- not using IE. But nonetheless, I implore you to get in on making history when the new Firefox launches in June. The Mozilla foundation hopes to set a new world record for the “most downloads” in a 24 hour period. I sure hope they have a lot of servers and mirrors lined up. Here is the official badge:

So go ahead and pledge to download the new software the day it comes out (which incidently has yet to be announced, but it will be in June.)  And if you have a site, blog, myspace, or all of the above- by all means add the fox to your site.  This could generate some great press and further the reduction of the buggy, unsecure, piece of crap that is IE.

I finally did it.

After making noise about it for better than 8 months, I bought a Macbook Pro over the weekend, and joined the “Apple Elite.” Having sworn off Microsoft months ago and using Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon as my mainstay OS, I was already aware of the greener pastures awaiting me on my trip out of Redmond.

The first few days in Macland have been great. I got most of my stuff moved over from Ubuntu with no problems, got Ruby installed, Gems, Rails, Mysql, the whole stack working great.

However, the biggest problem came from another, slightly smaller, but no less over priced monopoly of Enterprise software, Adobe. Now most of the Adobe CS3 suite is great, albeit a little bloated. Like many, I wish they had a little competition.

As a veteran of the web world, I have been using Macromedia, and then Adobe’s Dreamweaver software for building web sites for a long time. Longer than I could remember as it turns out. I learned this when I decided to go about moving my CS3 license over to the Mac platform.

Having bought a Dreamweaver license before Macromedia started keeping track of online purchases on their extranet means a couple things:

• You are a very loyal customer
• You are among their oldest customers
• They have sucked more money out of you then most people
• You probably have a lot of friends and maybe a lot of influence online
• You are among the most experienced web people around, and cheapest to support
• You run into the most trouble if you need to go from Windows to Apple platform

Now to me, this stinks, and it smells of a broken system. Come on Adobe, compared to newer purchasers of your software, I am sure those of us who bought way back at the very beginnings of Macromedia’s existence are relatively few. At least give us a perk for sticking around for so long.

The problem is that to upgrade your license, your purchase history with Macro-Adobe doesn’t matter. Your golden ticket, so to speak, is the first product you ever bought. I looked on the extranet and saw the oldest one was circa 2000, “Macromedia Ultradev 4″ and figured, “I am all set!”

But as I learned over 3 consecutive calls and over 60 minutes on hold, this was not it. No, I had bought something even more antiquated, and now I had to produce it to complete my move to Macland, and avoid a $1600 Adobe fine along the way.

After rumaging through box after box in my basement, and plenty of cursing, the earliest I actually had on hand was Dreamweaver 2! If you remember Dreamweaver 2, you have better memory than I, because that had to be ten or more years ago. But there it was stacked neatly with Fireworks 2, Dreamweaver 3, Fireworks 3, and Ultradev, the License code for each scribed neatly on the disk in my handwriting. And oh yeah… Microsoft Office 97 was in the stack too. Are you kidding me? It was a little like returning to the incarnation of the web!

Anyhow, once I had the required documentation in hand, things went relatively smoothly and about a week later FedEx showed up with a box containing my packaged CS3 suite box- for the Mac. I installed, and everything is great now.

I am truly scared to “destroy” my old software now, even though Adobe made me promise to do so. What if I need to move from Mac to some new unheard of system in 30 years? I just might need them then!

Note- I wrote most of this story about two weeks ago and held off on posting it- I wanted to make sure I had the new version in hand before writing my criticisms. And yes, I love Adobe stuff, its just this process is broken! Clearly!

This is the first post in a series I am going to call “Growing this Blog.” Essentially I plan to periodically chronicle the progression of Brainnovate. I am not so egotistical to think that my little blog will reach great heights, but if it does, I figure it sure will be useful to people to be able to go back and see how I got there.

I kicked this blog off two weeks ago today, and it’s been interesting. After a few relatively placid posts I decided to kick it up a notch with a highly opinionated (and maybe not so well researched) article on how CMS platforms are bad for Innovation. It was like a calling out for the Drupal community… generating a bunch of backlinks, pingbacks and comments. People were polarized- some agreeing and some disagreeing. Only a few took it personally.

This also sent a flood of traffic to my new blog- barely a week old when I wrote the post! Wow, in a way its been like going from zero to 60 25 mph in one week. Its amazing how strongly people reacted to a blog with fewer than 10 posts total.

I have learned a couple important lessons:

1. First it pays to be opinionated. Pro bloggers like Michael Arrington know this, although you risk your credibility when you do it. Arrington has been called the “Fox News” of the blogosphere more than once for his drama injected reporting. Yet people keep reading and he has an astounding 800k RSS subscribers. He must be doing something right.
2. If you want to get people involved in a post, involve a programming community. This I already knew- which is why I did it. For some reason, writing code seems to engender an amazing loyalty and passion. A lot of people, once beyond the basics of a given language, tool, or framework, put a stake in the ground and are willing to step up and defend it like a nation defending their homeland. This is true even if the tool is not optimal for the described use case.

Thats all for now on this topic, we’ll circle back in a couple more weeks and see what has happened.

On Friday I attended a “LivePitch” event put on by FundingUniverse.com This was very similar to speed pitching events, but was open to the public. In case you are not familiar with the concept of speedpitching, it follows the same format as speed dating, where a number of entrepreneurs get to pitch their startup, but they only have 4 or 5 minutes to do it. In an hour, potential investors can quickly see if they want to “date” any of the entrepreneurs. Typically these are closed door affairs, meaning unless you have money to invest, you aren’t getting in.

FundingUniverse decided to change this paradigm up and created the “LivePitch” format to allow anyone to come and watch. Everyone in attendance was give $100 dollars in fake money to invest in any of the five companies who were pitching. In addition, there was a panel of “celebrity judges,” made up Steve Grizzell (Innoventures Capital), Stan Kanarowski (Park City Angels), Jeremy Hanks (DOBA), Mark Bonham (Ray Quinney and Nebeker), Kent Thomas (Olympus Angels) who judged the entries and gave feedback on each idea.

The five companies that pitched are summarized here, along with their approximate investment totals:

1. Dolphin3D: A new web browser with many new features not found in IE ($250)
2. Egghead Intensity: Social network for new college graduates ($350)
3. InciteWorld: Social network and resources for medical associations ($500)
4. iSecureMyNet: Portable security product to protect your passwords on any device ($1100)
5. ISYS Technologies: Patented computing technology that promises much smaller CPUs that run cooler and can easily be grouped together ($3000)

Congrats to each of the presenters for getting up and sharing their concept. ISYS was the clear winner among the audience “investors” and also was the top pick of the expert panel. You can learn more about their technology at their web site or Youtube channel.

Prebuilt software like Wordpress (which this blog uses), Drupal, Joomla, and other similar systems are bad for innovation. There… I said it. I love Wordpress after avoiding it for years. The past 2 weeks have been the best 2 weeks of blogging in my life. And these tools are great for 95% of use cases- most sites will benefit immensely from putting them in the engine box.

Although I haven’t used it, Drupal sounds like Wordpress on steroids, with an attached boat anchor to slow you down. My friend Jeremy over at QuitYourDayJob lost two weeks of his life trying to teach it to sit, stay, and fetch. Now it works great.

These tools are immensely powerful, don’t get me wrong. But they are really optimized for doing something that has already been done. If you want a simple blog, brochure site, forum, simple social networking features, etc, then this will get you there quickly. Not a bad strategy if you can find a corner of the market without good coverage yet. But this blog is about innovation, and doing things that haven’ t been done before.

If you really want to do something unique and revolutionary, relying on a CMS will kill you dead. Imagine if the guys who built Twitter started out with a CMS platform and went from there. You think Twitter has problems now There are a lot of people “gunning” to be the next Facebook, Myspace, etc. They are not using a CMS either.

So if you are new to all this, step back and think about other tools that are available. Personally, I recommend and use Ruby on Rails extensively. Python with Django is quite strong as well. The main difference with these things is that you can write applications that do things that haven’t been done before, or at least haven’t been done by thousands of other people.

So I had an idea as I was writing the previous post for a “TwitterStumble” type site.

Like Stumbleupon but with peoples home page links in Twitter. It may (probably already exists so let me know if it does.)

What is interesting is that the audience on Twitter represents the 1 million earliest adopters, and crawling through peoples links you are bound to find something good.

It would should be easy enough to build using the Twitter API. I just added it to IdeaCV: