Global Nerdy

Aaron "Reddit" Swartz recounted an experience I found both amusing and thought-provoking:

Once I went far outside the city to have lunch with an author I respected. He asked about what I did, wanted me to explain it in great detail. He asked how many visitors we had. I told him and he sputtered. "I've spent fifteen years building an audience, and you're telling me in a year you have a million visitors?" I assented.

Puzzled, he insisted I show him the site on his own computer, but he found it was just a simple as I described. (Simpler, even.) "So it's just a list of links?" he said. "And you don't even write them yourselves?" I nodded. "But there's nothing to it!" he insisted. "Why is it so popular?"

At first, you might take this as an indictment of the value we place on the services created by business in general. It's a discontent we can aim as easily at YouTube as we can at Reddit; $1.6BB for a site where people share inane videos (with none of that money going to the videos authors, directors, or actors)?

Upon a little reflection, though, it struck me that the "nothing" the author saw is the key to the value of a service like Reddit. It's supposed to help me sort and sift through an unmanageable pile of information. To do it right, Reddit has to do it simply. So simply, that it's almost invisible to me. It approaches (but never reaches) nothing.

The internet has never had a problem with content scarcity. If anything, the problem is overabundance. We've got too much something. There's real merit in helping people find what they need without adding to the problem. Perhaps that's the "nothing" Aaron's author saw.

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Tags: Reddit, Aaron Swartz, nothing, simplicity, overabundance

I guess what the Sydney Morning Herald taketh away, the Wall Street Journal can giveth:

Two years ago, Mr. Arrington, a onetime lawyer and Internet executive, was living the life of a surf bum in southern California. Today, the 36-year-old has become one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley. Like a latter-day Henry Blodget, the onetime star Wall Street analyst who helped fuel the late 1990s dot-com frenzy, Mr. Arrington uses his TechCrunch blog to determine the destinies of new start-ups and to fan the flames of the current Internet boom.

For many Silicon Valley venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, TechCrunch has become a must read. Internet companies mentioned on the blog often report huge increases in business after they're featured. Others get unsolicited calls from venture capitalists who want to give them money. Last month, it was credited with being the first to report the rumors that search-giant Google Inc. was considering buying the online-video site YouTube Inc. for $1.6 billion.

Of course, in a Crunchnote on the story, Arrington seems irritated by the Journal's "fascination around the economics of our business and the conflicts/disclosure issue," which seems odd. First of all, isn't that the basis for how TechCrunch is different than the mainstream media and, second, it's just a graf in a pretty long article. It's actually quite neutral. The same, however, can't be said about this vicious attack:

Some investors worry Mr. Arrington and his ilk may contribute to an investment bubble that could end badly. In May, Josh Kopelman, an investor with First Round Capital in Philadelphia, warned on his blog that many Web companies today "run a big risk of designing a product/service that is targeted at too small of an audience," namely subscribers to Mr. Arrington's TechCrunch blog. (The number of subscribers, then 53,651, has since grown to 133,000, according to the site.) The TechCrunch blog has also spawned its own minipublicity loop, with other bloggers rehashing many of the tidbits Mr. Arrington reports and posting photos from his backyard keg parties. [emphasis mine]

Hey! What's with the "rehashing" crack, Journal?

Readers, there's a war going on between the mainstream media dinosaurs, and the young blogging Turks like Global Nerdy! To the barricades, comrades!

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Tags: TechCrunch, Wall Street Journal, Arrington

Yes, it's an old photo (it's from May of this year), but it's been getting a lot of play among my hax0r homies today — Bill Gates and Jay-Z, together at last.

There's so much “Urkel” in this scene; no doubt we're pushing the theoretical maximum here.

paidContent has the skinny on an imminent round of financing for the stealth, New York-based "distributed news" venture  Daylife:

You’re reading it here first … After a year of mostly veiled references and speculation fueled by the involvement of Jeff Jarvis as an adviser and Craig Newmark as an investor, Daylife, the distributed news platform founded by Upendra Shardanand, is about to see the light of day—funded by roughly twice as many investors as it has employees.

Among the brand-name investors: The New York Times, Mark "TechCrunch" Arrington, Scott "Meetup" Heiferman, Dave "scripting.com" Winer, Azeem "I Don't Know Him But He's a Big Deal British Technology Guy" Azhar, and a handful of other technology mover-and-shaker types.

Upendra is a friend of mine, and he's been nurturing this project for quite some time. I have no inside knowledge to share (as opposed to the insiders listed above, who have knowledge they won't share), but it seems like the core mission—organizing news from multiple sources in idiosyncratically relevant ways—has been pretty constant throughout, and I'm keen to see how it's ultimately developed.

Between Digg, Reddit, Megite, Tailrank, et al, lots of people are trying to add some structure and value to the overabundance of news out there, but none of the crowd-based approaches seems to quite hit home for me. I still find myself working to pick the needles out of the haystack. A different approach couldn't hurt and might help.

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Tags: Daylife, investors, distributed news

After reading our piece, Extended
Warranties are for Suckers, go check out Robert
Mitchell's article in ComputerWorld Blogs,
How
I Got Suckered into an Extended
Warranty.

There will probably be a plethora of cold, hard analyses of Conde Nast's acquisition of Reddit, some of which I'm sure will be worthwhile reading. However, make sure you get a look at this entry in Aaron Swartz's blog, in which he gives us a look at the deal from a more personal angle.

Maybe it's just me, but if I were his situation, I think I'd be considerably less angst-y. Actually, probably not angst-y at all. I'd likely perch myself in a suit made of hundred-dollar bills atop the tallest building in town, playing Spinal Tap's Gimme Some Money on my accordion.

Update: Be sure to check out Aaron's prior article, The Aftermath.

While I don't often give in to the techie compulsion to have the latest and greatest gear, I think I purchase more tech stuff than the average non-techie, particularly when it comes to computers. Back when I was an independent software developer, I was always a little paranoid about having my computer go out of commission, and so I gladly forked over an extra couple of hundred dollars for the extended warranty.

In the past fifteen years, I've never had to make use of the extended warranty. I've had to make use of the standard one-year warranty twice: once with the faulty hard drive on a Toshiba laptop and once with a company-issued Dell Inspiron laptop whose video card preferred to display static.

That's to be expected. Many products, electronics included, generally fail either very close to the start of their working lives or at the end of their expected lifespan from wear, tear and regular use. The “bathtub curve” is a term that's used by statisticians to describe the probability of failure of these products, and it looks like this:

I stopped buying extended warranties around 5 or 6 years ago because I was beginning to get the feeling that they were nothing more than a surcharge for the overly cautious. Between never having had to make use of them, constantly falling prices and the rather suspicious insistence of salespeople that I should buy one, even for items that cost less than 50 bucks, I was getting the gut feeling that they were a rip-off.

Someone's done the math and my hunch was right. A New York Times article titled The Word on Warranties: Don't Bother expains why:

• They're actually a profit center for retailers. The margins on electronics are very thin, but they extended warranty margins are as high as 80%.
• It's a sucker's bet: you're betting against the bathtub curve and you're also betting against the trend of falling prices in the belief that the cost of repair will exceed the cost of replacement.
• A Consumer Reports study shows that only 10% of digital cameras fail in their first five years. For the extended warranty to be valuable, it would have to be less than 10% of the purchase price, yet extended warranties often cost as much as 20% of the item's price. Besides, if you had a five-year old digital camera, you'd probably want to replace it, not repair it.
• Last year, suckers spent $16 billion on extended warranties.

So take it from us (and the New York Times too): skip the extended warranty.

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