Edd's shared items
Web analytics startup GetClicky sure was happy when we linked to them a couple of months ago to show early Google Chrome usage stats.
And now they want more.
They’ve got a new user-translation tool to make their site available to non-English speakers, modeled on the the Facebook approach. The first I heard of it was a couple of days ago when the founder emailed us about it.
But instead of just letting us know about the feature, he unleashed a barrage of criticism about our Facebook-love (Facebook would disagree), accused us of bias and says we’ll forever lose his respect if we don’t write about them:
Clicky analytics (getclicky.com) released a crowd sourced translation framework back in April, and we have just now made available the results. Our service is now available in 12 languages, all contributed and voted on by hundreds of our users.
http://getclicky.com/blog/144/clicky-is-now-available-in-12-languages
I know you’re thinking, that’s great, now why the hell do I care? I’ll tell you why. Earlier this year, Facebook released a similar system, and you thought it was SO AMAZING that you had to write FOUR stories on the topic:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/21/facebook-taps-users-to-create-translated-versions-of-site/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/07/facebook-turns-1500-users-into-spanish-translation-slaves/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/02/facebook-now-in-german-thanks-to-2000-generous-users/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/31/facebook-gets-aggressive-on-translations-adding-22-more-languages/Many people think you write way too much about Facebook (myself included), and/or that you have a major bias towards them. Well I want you to prove us all wrong. Prove that you wrote about this feature on Facebook four seperate times, not because it’s Facebook and you love them, but because it is in fact a really cool feature that would be amazing for any site to implement.
Prove that you write about stories not because it’s a company you love, but because the company is doing something cool, even if it’s not the first of its kind (by the way, interesting factoid, Clicky is 100% programmed by ONE person (that’d be me), I wrote this entire framework myself. How many programmers does Facebook have? Probably a couple of hundred?)
Prove your integrity by writing us up for the same amazing feature, or you will simply prove that you do in fact have a major Facebook bias, and you will have forever lost my respect. I’m being completely serious.
Sean
Ok Sean. I have no idea why you didn’t just email us about the feature minus the insults. I won’t mention the fact that this me-too feature isn’t nearly as interesting as you think it is. Or that Facebook’s initial launch of the translation tool propelled them way past MySpace to 160 million monthly unique visitors around the world (which is why we continue to mention it). Or that polite emails tend to lead towards better results than this. No, insulting us was definitely the right approach. Here’s your post.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
In case you missed this link over at Daring Fireball, there is an amazing bug in all versions of the G1/Android phone up to and including RC29.
ALL keystrokes entered on the device's physical keyboard are also silently sent to a hidden background shell process that is running as root.
This means that, for example, from anywhere on the phone, you can type the letters "reboot" followed by return, and the phone will reboot. I tried it. It really does.
I really wanted to try "rm -rf /*" but couldn't bring myself to do it.
To reiterate, this is not any sort of hack -- it's a straight-up bug in the shipping version of the Android OS. There's supposedly an over-the-air patch being sent out to fix it, but my G1's still all the way back on RC19 and hasn't been offered any upgrades since I bought it a week and a half ago.
Check out this essay in the New Yorker about undecided voters. Money quote:
To put them [undecided voters] in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”
To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.
I mean, really, what’s to be confused about?
Microblogging service explodes with Twittard wits
It was an epic night for nettards and social inadequates as Barack Obama beat that guy the Vietnamese tortured to become the United States' first black African-American president-elect. And hey, it was all go down at Twitter, as the microblogging service exploded in a veritable bukkake of inanities and half-baked blogulations.…
We've all been there. You started reading something on the Web, saw something interesting in the article, searched for it, wound up somewhere else, and after about 12 hops you've forgotten exactly what it was you were looking for. If only there were some way to select that topic midstream and have the information automagically appear for you, without disrupting your workflow or sending you traipsing off into the wilds of the Web.
If that sounds familiar, you may need a shot of Juice, a new Firefox 3 add-in currently in public beta from Linkool Labs, that makes researching Web content as easy as click-and-drag.
Sponsor
Juice is ridiculously easy - and addictive - to use. Simply highlight the text into which you want to delve - or grab a link - and drag it ever so slightly. That's the only cue Juice needs to go to work. And suddenly your sidebar is filled with research results from Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Google Blogsearch, and more.
Juice also adds the ability to capture images and video to a personal library - similar to some of the functionality found in Twine - enabling users to access those assets regardless of what they're doing in the main browser window.
How does Juice accomplish this? The Linkool team describes Juice as an "intelligent discovery engine," highlighting:
This engine, comprised of a natural language processing system and a dictionary management system, helps to evolve the semantic web by connecting keywords with the most relevant, rich content from third-party web services.
Of course, the mention of the "Semantic Web" caught our attention. It's no secret that we here at ReadWriteWeb are fans of the Semantic Web, but unfortunately, we often find the concept reduced to a buzzword that - once implemented in a product - has a hard time living up to the hype.
Juice seems to avoid some of the more traditional stumbling blocks of Semantic apps by taking a very top-down approach focused on a distinct data set. Confining the activity to user-selected terms, Juice manages to sidestep issues that have plagued apps which attempt to consume and use much larger sets of information. Smaller chunks of data allow Juice to return more compelling results.
Room for Improvement
But for all its ingenuity and ease-of-use, Juice isn't without its shortcomings.
As mentioned, it's currently only available on Firefox 3, meaning users of other popular browsers will have to continue their current searching rigamarole or convert to Firefox. That, and it's part and parcel of the browser on which you install it. There doesn't seem to be any synching with a Web account to allow you to use your data on different machines.
When it comes to where you search for information, there doesn't seem to be any way of customizing the resources that Juice chooses to search. So if you prefer IceRocket or Ask to Google Blogsearch, you're out of luck.
If you're into customizing your look and feel, Juice doesn't appear to have any options there, either. The information pane always appears on the right of the browser. I couldn't find any way to move it to the bottom, where I would prefer to have it.
Based on what Juice delivers, none of those are showstoppers, especially given that Juice is currently in beta. Those shortcomings aren't going to prevent many users from taking it for a spin and likely integrating it into their browsing experience.
The simplicity of use is definitely there. As is the compelling depth of research that occurs with a simple click-and-drag. Combine that functionality with Juice's ability to let users work and research without disrupting their workflow, and Juice appears to be a worthwhile addition for any Firefox 3 user.
Discuss
Comments are the lifeblood of TechCrunch, and we love ‘em. But we also get our share of the freaks, conspiracy theorists and jerks out there who have something to say and believe they have a constitutional or God given right to say it, right here. The author thinks they’re funny and insightful, but when we see the same comment over and over (and over) again, we fail to laugh.
Ten of our least favorite comment types are below. Which one are you?
- “Slow news day?” - Typically left on stories that the reader thinks are boring, not newsworthy or off topic. A recent example is the Britney on Twitter story - early on someone made this insightful comment and the story ended up with 112 comments. This comment is left at least once per day on some story, and usually multiple times per day. We usually delete them.
We haven’t had a slow news day at TechCrunch, ever. I always have a list of ten or more posts to write, and am just looking for the time to get to them. If a story is on the site, it means we want it to be there.
- “TechCrunch is really going downhill lately.” - First left in 2005, a couple of months after the blog launched. Seen daily since then.
- [random trolling, often with a wish that we'd die or are unethical in some way] - We get lots of these, and delete as many of them as we can. But first we check the IP address against previous comments left on the site. About once a month we see a really nasty anonymous comment that’s left by an IP address that had always been used by a single named commenter before that. Most of the time we had just posted a critical review of the person’s company right before the comment was left.
We don’t publish the real names of these people, but I do keep a list of people that seem to be really disturbed in some way. It’s often funny to see them at an event, acting like they really think TechCrunch is great.
If you are going to say something nasty, use your real name or learn about the magic of proxy servers
- “SoAndSo already did this” - A comment left when the reader believes that the new service we are describing is not a new idea, and therefore shouldn’t be given any attention. The problem is that there is very rarely a brand new idea. Instead, most of the products we review are iterations on what’s come before. And sometimes a new product tries to tackle the same problem that someone else has in a new way.
While it’s worth pointing out other products that are similar or relevant to new ones, it isn’t interesting to simply suggest they are a copycat of something else. If we’re covering it, we think it’s interesting or unique in some way.
- “Nice journalism…where’s the balance?” This comment, which comes in many forms, criticizes us for writing a one-sided story. People are used to reading old media, where journalists don’t write their opinions. Instead, they get sources to say what they want. I’ve seen this first hand - being interviewed for half an hour or more on a topic and then seeing a single, misleading quote in the finished product.
We don’t strive to be balanced. We strive to be correct. And we don’t try to trick the reader by making them think some source said something they really didn’t.
- “How much did the company pay you to write this post?” This is a conspiracy theory comment, bred in the minds of people who only see evil in the world. Think through this for a moment…if we ever asked for or received payment for a post, how long would it take for someone to talk? We are stubbornly independent, and our opinions are our own. If someone offered to pay us for a post, we’d just publish the offer immediately and humiliate the company.
When it comes to advertisers, we have a strict ethical wall between sales and editorial, just like “real” media. You can buy ads all you like on TechCrunch, but it won’t get you editorial coverage.
- “What’s your problem with [Company X]“ - Often left when we critically cover Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL or Google. Most recently it’s been Yahoo, which has been mismanaged beyond negligence this year. These comments are particularly funny when its alter ego (see immediately below) is written after a positive story on the same company.
I write what I think, and then I write why I think it. If you disagree, great. But that doesn’t mean there is a conspiracy theory to trash a company unfairly.
- “You are such a Yahoo/Microsoft/Google/AOL shill.” - This is Yin to no. 7’s Yang. What’s really entertaining is watching the comments on a negative post on a company and seeing something like this, when a day or two earlier the opposite comment was left on a positive post about the same company.
- “I hope you die/I’m going to kill you” - These comments happen more often than you’d think. More on that in a later post. In one awesome example we got a non-anonymous death threat from a startup engineer. When I sent it to the CEO, he said “ah, that’s just him, he’s a little strange. Hey, when are you going to cover our new product?” To this day we haven’t mentioned that startup again on TechCrunch. There are lines that shouldn’t be crossed, and threatening to kill any of our writers, my dog, or my family is one of them.
- “Unsubscribed!” - A comment left after we’ve expressed an opinion counter to what the reader believes. Saying they are unsubscribing is their way of showing that they think we deserve a decline in readership. Our counter is to ban certain readers, most of whom get apoplectic and fail to realize that we have no way of stopping people from reading the site’s content.
We can live with a few readers unsubscribing out of anger from time to time, it shows we’re at least keeping things interesting. If you really think we’re derailing, leave a reasonable comment saying why you think so. We listen closely to those.
Bonus: “You deleted my comment!” - left after someone has said something spammy, hateful or ridiculously stupid. The reader then comes back and complains that we’ve violated their right to free speech and are censoring them. Besides the fact that they’ve confused us with the U.S. government and their constitutional rights, they’re generally unwelcome and quickly get an IP block.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Can an e-commerce company scale like a web app? The answer, as we all know, is no. However, given that Amazon ’scaled’ by creating a market for items which could fit through a letterbox, a UK company plans to do the same - this time with food, specifically healthy food like nuts and dried berries.
Graze is a new UK startup created by Graham Bosher, ex of LoveFilm, who decided he wanted to eat better in the office but was working in a location which made this near impossible. As he happened to be responsible for LoveFilm’s delivery platform (1 million+ postal transactions a week) he put two and two together and Graze was born. The LoveFilm connection is strong. The three non-execs on the board are William Reeve (LoveFilm/Screenselect Founder), Simon Morris (LoveFilm’s Marketing Director), Mark Livingstone (LoveFilm’s ex CEO). Backers including Saul & Robin Klein of TAG and Arts Alliance Ventures.
The idea is that Graze makes it easier for people to eat healthily at work and combine this with value (useful in these credit-crunch times). They delivery a full letter-box-sized box of healthy food (nuts, berries, dried fruit etc) straight to a desk for less than an empty box (the delivery charge) of an online supermarket. Graze launched 3 weeks ago and - they say - it’s spreading virally in offices throughout the country.
Graze of course is limited by the need for a warehouse. But if it can be as efficient as Amazon’s then I guess the idea can ’scale’ to whatever that can take.
Update: Here’s a video from a recent customer…
There are some days when I really, really, really wish I were still writing Fake Steve, and friends, this is one of them. In case you haven’t heard, Bloomberg accidentally ran Steve Jobs’s obituary today, and then retracted it. Luckily, Gawker decided to humiliate Bloomberg by publishing the entire obit, including the list of people that Bloombots should call if/when Dear Leader actually does die, which I’m still not sure he ever will, because as far as I can recall from all that Greek and Latin I took in high school a man-god born of Zeus and mortal woman should be an immortal being, and furthermore, how would Apple PR handle it? I suppose for a while they could just stonewall by saying they weren’t here today to talk about Steve, they were here to talk about how excited everyone is about [FILL IN NAME OF NEW PRODUCT HERE] and maybe they could buy themselves a year or two during which the Apple faithful would continue to believe Steve was really alive despite having seen reports to the contrary on the news. But eventually people would start to notice that they hadn’t seen Steve around for a while, and they might even start to doubt Apple’s line about Steve missing Macworld because he was stuck in traffic. And then what happens? It makes me shiver to think about it. For this reason alone, this cannot happen. Steve Jobs cannot die.
Try telling that to the filthy hacks, however. Gawker goes out of its way to point out that “news organizations routinely prepare obituaries in advance,” but I still think Bloomberg’s gaffe is significant. Clearly they were refreshing Jobs’s obituary, and from this I would infer that perhaps their editors were, um, not so utterly convinced by Steve’s recent off-the-record conversation with Joe Nocera in the Times. Or maybe it was those very strong “Steve’s health is a personal issue. Steve’s health is a personal issue. Steve’s health is a personal issue” statements from Apple PR. Yeah. Those went a long way toward putting everyone at ease.
Guess what? Bloomberg ain’t the only ones who are getting antsy. Back when Steve appeared onstage looking like crap and the whole “Is he sick?” thing began, one of my fellow filthy hacks, a guy who works at a very top-drawer news organization, got the word from his editors back in New York to start writing the Jobs obit and make sure he had it banked and ready to go. I told him it was pointless because Steve was fine and this whole “thin” thing was an optical illusion. I even showed him the hundreds of emails and blog comments I’d received from readers who don’t know Steve and don’t even know anyone who knows anyone who knows Steve but who were nonetheless absolutely sure that Steve was fine and were just furious that the press was making such a big deal of it since the whole thing was so obviously a load of crap. Didn’t work. The hack still wrote the obit. Though, to his credit, he has so far managed not to publish it.
Great work, Bloomberg. You dopes.
